There is no such thing as "the liberal media."

That is language concocted by the Republican Party and right-wing consultants with the goal of bullying the American news media into being compliant and subservient to the "conservative" agenda.

And they were remarkably successful in achieving that goal.

Decades later it is now an accepted "fact" among America's political class, the general public, and the mainstream news media itself that there is such a thing as "liberal bias" in the news industry. The enduring myth of the "liberal media" is one of many examples of how the American right has successfully weaponized language with a propaganda campaign to shape the country's political terrain in their interests.

Republicans have marketed themselves as defenders of "freedom." In reality, they are authoritarians who support a range of policies that limit human and civil rights.

The Republican Party has created a brand that is based upon "family values." This is fiction. The policies and ideology of the modern GOP are centered upon gutting the social safety net and ending the county's already very weak and still developing social democracy. If they are successful in that agenda, the overall well-being of American families will be greatly diminished.

The "conservative" movement staunchly claims to be "pro-life." This is not true. Their policies and ideology have actually shortened the lives of the American people as seen with health care, gun violence, the global climate crisis and environment, the COVID pandemic, and social inequality more generally.

Former Rep. Newt Gingrich is one of the main architects of the strategy that allowed the Republican Party to win the language wars and the central role of the myth of "the liberal media" in that outcome. In 1995, the media watchdog group FAIR explained how:

Since winning control of Congress, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) has constantly complained about "destructive" and "negative" coverage from the "liberal elite media."… In fact, the new speaker of the House—who once described his goal as "reshaping the entire nation through the news media" (New York Times, 12/14/94)—has given a great deal of thought to the media and how to manipulate them. One Newtonian axiom is "fights make news" (Boston Globe, 11/20/94). Another skill he has taught to Republican candidates through his political organization, GOPAC, is how to create a "shield issue" to deflect criticism…

But the clearest expression of Gingrich's philosophy of media came in a GOPAC memo entitled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Distributed to GOP candidates across the country, the memo's list of words for Democrats and words for Republicans was endorsed by Gingrich in a cover letter: "The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language." Next time you hear Gingrich complain about media focusing on the negative, refer back to these lists.

In a widely cited 2003 essay at The Nation, media critic and author Eric Alterman said the following about the myth of "the liberal media":

Move over to the mainstream publications and broadcasts often labeled "liberal," and you see how ridiculous the notion of liberal dominance becomes. ….

I could go on, but the point is clear: Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match–either in size, ferocity or commitment–for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.

In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."

The right is working the refs. And it's working. Much of the public believes a useful but unsupportable myth about the so-called liberal media, and the media themselves have been cowed by conservatives into repeating their nonsensical nostrums virtually nonstop. As the economist/pundit Paul Krugman observes of Republican efforts to bully the media into accepting the party's Orwellian arguments about Social Security privatization: "The next time the administration insists that chocolate is vanilla, much of the media–fearing accusations of liberal bias, trying to create the appearance of 'balance'–won't report that the stuff is actually brown; at best they'll report that some Democrats claim that it's brown."

In the real world of the right-wing media, the pundits are the conservatives' shock troops. Even the ones who constantly complain about alleged liberal control of the media cannot ignore the vast advantage their side enjoys when it comes to airing their views on television, in the opinion pages, on the radio and the Internet.

In total, the mainstream news media is inherently "small c" conservative. As a social institution it prioritizes making money and is averse to change. As such, the American mainstream news media also serves an agenda-setting and boundary-enforcing function that sets limits on the "approved public discourse." In that role, liberal and progressives are routinely silenced out of deference to "conservative" and right-wing voices – however extreme the latter may be.

Because the mainstream news media are aligned with the powerful as a class, they prioritize having access to them in what is a parasitic and symbiotic relationship. In practice, this meant that access to the powerful — especially for DC beltway journalists — is more important than bold truth-telling and consistently speaking truth to power. The conservative nature of the American news media and its institutional bias towards "normalcy" helps to explain why it has been so unable to properly pivot and adapt to the realities of the Age of Trump, rising neofascism, and the country's ongoing democracy crisis. Thus, the continued habit of using obsolete norms such as "bothsideism," an overempahsis on "horserace coverage," an obsession with political personalities instead of systems and power, and an amplification of the controversy of the day instead of on fundamental issues.

One of the most dangerous examples of how the media has been conditioned by the right through the myth of "liberal bias" is how it is now helping to launder the reputations of several Trump regime members and other Republican fascists. In a very high-profile example of reputation laundering, The New York Times — which is routinely attacked by right-wing media for committing the "crime" of "liberal bias" (a baseless and absurd claim) — recently featured a guest opinion essay by former Trump regime advisor and propagandist Kellyanne Conway. Her Times op-ed contained Trump political pornography such as this:

Donald J. Trump shocked the world in 2016 by winning the White House and becoming the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience. He upended the fiction of electability pushed by pundits, the news media and many political consultants, which arrogantly projects who will or will not win long before votes are cast. He focused instead on capturing a majority in the Electoral College, which is how a candidate does or does not win. Not unlike Barack Obama eight years earlier, Mr. Trump exposed the limits of Hillary Clinton's political inevitability and personal likability, connected directly with people, ran an outsider's campaign taking on the establishment, and tapped into the frustrations and aspirations of millions of Americans.

Some people have never gotten over it. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. There is no vaccine and no booster for it. Cosseted in their social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness, the afflicted disguise their hatred for Mr. Trump as a righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country. So desperate is the incessant cry to "get Trump!" that millions of otherwise pleasant and productive citizens have become naggingly less so. They ignore the shortcomings, failings and unpopularity of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and abide the casual misstatements of an administration that says the "border is secure," inflation is "transitory," "sanctions are intended to deter" Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and they will "shut down the virus." They've also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 and not in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In her New York Times audition for a job on Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, Conway also wrote:

A popular sentiment these days is, "I want the Trump policies without the Trump personality." It is true that limiting the name-calling frees up time and space for persuasion and solutions. Still, it may not be possible to have one without the other. Mr. Trump would remind people that it was a combination of his personality and policies that forced Mexico to help secure our border; structured new trade agreements and renewed manufacturing, mining and energy economies; pushed to get Covid vaccines at warp speed; engaged Kim Jong-un; played hardball with China; routed ISIS and removed Qassim Suleimani, Iran's most powerful military commander; forced NATO countries to increase their defense spending and stared down Mr. Putin before he felt free to invade Ukraine.

When it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see. Much like with the audio debate a few years ago "Do you hear 'Laurel' or 'Yanny'?," what some perceive as an abrasive, scornful man bent on despotism, others see as a candid, resolute leader unflinchingly committed to America's interests.

There were thousands of comments on the New York Times website in response to Conway's column and the publication's decision to allow her such a privileged platform. Based on a cursory review, a good many, if not most of these comments were negative. The Times even featured one such complaint in a letter to the editor:

A diversity of opinions and perspectives is a fantastic goal, and one reason I've been a longtime subscriber. Generally speaking, your opinion guest essays are well written and thoughtful and provide a point of view that makes one examine a topic with fresh eyes.

The opinion from Ms. Conway is not that.

Time and again she employs sloganeering to sling arrows at Democrats and non-Trumpists in an attempt to burnish the reputation of her former boss.

She continues to attempt to turn neighbor against neighbor by perpetuating the othering of Trump detractors and the denial of Mr. Trump's and her attacks on voting, democracy and simple decency.

Hers is not another "opinion"; it is carefully crafted and intentional spin to appeal to people's sense of grievance and to reaffirm the lies and misinformation they are so ready to believe.

Her inclusion in your paper diminishes the quality of debate, and galvanizes a person America would be better off forgetting.

Conway is representative of a larger pattern where such leading news media outlets as the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NBC and others are deciding to amplify and provide a platform for Trumpists, Republican-fascists, and other right-wing anti-democracy voices. They are doing this behind the cover of "fairness" and "balancing" when in reality such a decision is based on fear, profit-maximizing, and strategically positioning themselves to be in good favor with the Republican Party, "conservatives" and other anti-democratic forces as a type of insurance policy and security blanket for what promises to be a very perilous and unsettled future.

In an essay at Medium, journalist and author Wajahat Ali warns that "Even in the face of increased threats and a failed coup, too many journalists in mainstream media outlets will continue to pave the road toward fascism with their 'both sides' coverage." He continues, "Access journalism is a parasitic relationship. Some of these journalists are like small remoras, or shark suckers, who attach to sharks to get to their destination. If they were riding the shark in JAWS, they'd write an article blaming the townspeople for forcing the shark to eat them":

There's a class of journalists belonging to legacy outlets and corporate media who are incapable of shedding their antiquated, toxic skin and adapting to the changing political and cultural landscape where disinformation, white supremacist conspiracy theories, and right-wing stochastic terrorism is the norm. Instead, they chase the North Star, which isn't the truth, but rather access to power, ratings, and a path toward personal success….

Instead of bending the knee to right-wing intimidation, platforming their lies, mainstreaming their hate, and engaging in "both sides" nonsense to create the fiction of symmetry in an utterly asymmetrical reality, these political journalists need to be biased in favor of the truth and democracy.

Ultimately, the American mainstream news media needs to engage in a type of personal inventory and critical self-reflection about its role in democracy and failings (and successes) in the Age of Trump and beyond.In short, it must do better as it strives to live up to the ideals of the Fourth Estate in a democracy. A big step in that direction would be refusing to participate in the reputation laundering and rehabilitation of Trump's regime members and other neo-fascists and enemies of democracy in today's Republican Party and larger right-wing and "conservative" movement.

If the American mainstream news media does not do this necessary and hard work it is just contributing to its own legitimacy crisis and lack of trust among the American people, which in turn means aiding the Republican fascists and other enemies of a free press and democracy.

The internet and social media are a type of experience machine.

At their worst, the internet and social media function as a self-reinforcing echo chamber and closed episteme in which many people confuse huge amounts of free and otherwise readily available "information" and "content" with true knowledge and hard-earned expertise.

The Algorithm is designed to keep "users" "engaged" by amplifying negative emotions and feelings of conflict where individuals who are experiencing emotional and spiritual emptiness, loneliness and other unmet human needs are stimulated into an endless if not compulsive cycle of clicks, scrolling, posts, comments, "likes", "shares" and other reactions. To that point, people who engage in "compulsive" internet use are more likely to exhibit the "Dark Triad" traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

In many ways, rage, anger and other negative emotions and behavior are the currency (and business model) of social media and the internet.

A 2021 Pew Research survey showed that 31 percent of American adults report being "constantly" online.

In a new essay at TomDispatch (republished at Salon) investigative journalist Andy Kroll reflects on what he learned researching conspiracy theories online and the toxic seductive power and allure of such spaces:

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.

Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I'm an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?

The correct answer is indeed: Right. And yet……

That frictionless glide from one post to the next, video after video, tweet upon tweet, plays tricks on the mind. Spend enough time in that realm and even the most absurd theories and narratives start to acquire the patina of logic, the ring of reason. How else to explain the sheer number of QAnon adherents — one in five Americans, according to an analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute — who believe that a secret cabal of pedophile elites, including Tom Hanks and Oprah, run the world, or that the Earth is indeed flat, or that the moon landing more than half a century ago was faked, no matter what news broadcaster Walter Cronkite might have said at the time?

Kroll continues:

Put simply, we don't stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize "engagement" at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest of them don't simply entertain, inform, or "connect" us. As New York Times reporter Max Fisher writes in his book "The Chaos Machine," "This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself."

Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there's no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

As seen on Jan. 6 and throughout the Age of Trump and the global democracy crisis, the internet and social media are a playground and a type of force multiplier for right-wing extremists including fascists, conspiracists, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and other malign actors to organize and plan, as well as to radicalize and recruit new members.

Donald Trump embodies the worst of human behavior. As the leader of a political cult movement, he has given his followers permission to be their true horrible selves. Fascism and other types of illiberal politics are those antisocial and antihuman emotions and impulses harnessed in the form of a reactionary revolutionary destructive political project.

To that end, Trump, the Republican fascists, and the larger white right were able to use the internet and social media to grow their base of support into a movement comprised of many tens of millions of (white) Americans. As many democracy experts and other observers have concluded, Trump's rise to power was empowered by the internet, social media, and how the American right wing has spent several decades creating a parallel media machine and other institutions that together function as a type of alternate universe for its followers.

Democrats, liberals, progressives and other pro-democracy Americans have no such equivalent countervailing force.

Writing at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, journalist Alan Miller offers this context:

The 2016 presidential election was a watershed in the evolution of misinformation and disinformation. It was also a breakthrough in public awareness of the scope and impact of harmful misinformation online and of the kaleidoscope of bad actors who produce it.

The public learned how much the companies running the platforms knew (especially Facebook), and how little they had been willing to do to curb it. The public also found out about the Russians' aggressive disinformation campaign to influence the election's outcome, pit Americans against each other, and undermine faith in democracy.

All these forces were at play before Donald Trump became president, but he relentlessly exploited and exacerbated them with constant prevarications and attacks on the news media. When journalists sought to hold him accountable, he dismissed their reporting as "fake news." He systematically eroded political norms and the rule of law. He spread harmful falsehoods about COVID-19 that cost an untold number of lives. And he undermined his supporters' faith in the election process.

Having gone from "alternative facts" (a phrase that entered the lexicon just two days after Trump's inauguration) to alternative realities upon his contentious departure from office, Americans now not only cannot agree on what the facts are; they cannot even agree on what a fact is.

This poses one of the great challenges of our time, because facts are the central nervous system of public life. They are the basis for what is taught in schools. For scientific inquiry and findings. For the legal system and jurisprudence. For societal debates and decisions about what constitutes effective public policy.
And facts most certainly are not partisan. If they are in trouble, we are on the path not only to an information dystopia, but very possibly to autocracy.

Trump, the Republican fascists and their allies were able to use the internet and social media to take control of the White House and other governing institutions as part of a much larger and ongoing assault on American democracy and freedom.

During the midterms, enough Americans voted to slow down the Republican fascists' assault on democracy and freedom. The Democrats would maintain control of the Senate. Instead of a clear majority in the House, the much-discussed "red tide" largely dissipated, leaving the Republican Party with a tenuous majority.

Recent research by Shaun Bowler, Miguel Carreras and Jennifer L. Merolla, which is featured in the journal Political Research Quarterly, suggests that the results of the midterm elections are a sign that Trump's power to use social media and the internet as part of his war on American democracy has been diminishing over time. Moreover, Trump's attempts to mobilize Republican voters and his cultists online may have actually helped the Democrats in the midterms.

Writing at PsyPost, Eric Dolan summarizes these findings:

Carreras and his colleagues found limited evidence that exposure to some of Trump's rhetoric moved people in a more anti-democratic direction. Independent participants who read Trump's attack on Congress tended to be more supportive of the idea of the president disregarding Congress and the courts. Trump's attack the media also lead to a greater endorsement of the president disregarding Congress among Republicans. These effects were mostly reversed among Democrats.

But the researchers found no evidence that exposure to Trump's tweets attacking the media, Congress, or the courts influenced attitudes regarding support for democracy. Those exposed to the control tweet were just as likely as those exposed to Trump's attacks to agree with the statement "Democracy may have problems, but it is better than any other form of government."

Trump's tweets attacking the media, Congress, or the courts also appeared to have no impact on support for strong leaders among Republican participants but decreased support for strong leaders among Democratic participants. In addition, those exposed to Trump's attack on the media were more likely to disagree with the statement "When the press publishes inaccurate information about the government, the president should be able to remove their license," an effect that was largely driven by Democrats.

"The key finding is that Trump's undemocratic messages in 2019 (a series of Tweets attacking other liberal institutions) did not lead to an erosion of democratic attitudes. On the contrary, the results suggest there is significant pushback against anti-democratic messages, especially among Democrats," Carreras told PsyPost.

Carreras concludes: "Our results add an important caveat to the literature on polarization and democratic erosion in the United States. Previous studies have emphasized the risk posed by partisan polarization for citizens' attachment to democratic norms. One possible silver lining of partisan polarization is that it can lead supporters of a pro-democracy outparty (i.e., the Democratic party during the Trump administration) to coalesce around democratic norms to fight against authoritarian excesses by the incumbent party."

This research complements the findings by Jon Green, William Hobbs, Stefan McCabe, and David Lazer as recently published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that right-wing conspiracy theories about the Big Lie and "stolen elections" are correlated with lower turnout for Republican candidates in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election and increased voting for Democratic candidates.

The abstract of "Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election" summarizes these findings as: "Liking or sharing messages opposed to conspiracy theories was associated with higher turnout than expected in the runoff election, and those who liked or shared tweets promoting fraud-related conspiracy theories were slightly less likely to vote."

At their best, the internet, social media and other digital technologies can be used to improve the human condition by providing information and facilitating communication and coordination in ways, that until very recently, were viewed as almost impossible. Unfortunately, those same traits have empowered malign actors and other anti-social and anti-human forces to attack and subvert democracy and the good society.

As many democracy experts and other watchdogs have repeatedly warned, the ability of the internet and social media and other technologies to exercise an outsized and often profoundly negative impact on society – and to do so under the near exclusive and accountability-free control of corporations and other private actors – highlights the need for more transparency, public accountability and regulation of such technology.

The future of global democracy (and society) may literally depend on how we collectively decide how much and in what ways the internet and social media, and these new technologies more broadly, should influence our lives, futures, and relationships to one another -- and the powerful.

Since the Russian invasion last February, the Ukrainian military has spent months trading space for time. That has proven a successful strategy: U.S. and NATO military assistance, excellent civilian and military leadership, a determined and well-trained military and a population committed to total resistance has evidently turned the tide against the Russian forces.

The Ukrainian military first pushed the Russians back from the attempted siege of Kyiv. In late August and September, the Ukrainians launched a series of bold offenses in the northeast and southeast, liberating a considerable amount of Russian-occupied territory, including the strategically important city of Kherson. But these battles have been costly for both sides. The Ukrainians have lost many thousands of soldiers and expended a large amount of their artillery supplies, particularly the precision-guided, long-range U.S.-made munitions that have been integral to interdicting Russian supplies, targeting command and control, and generally creating chaos behind the front line areas.

The Russians have suffered far worse losses: Western intelligence agencies estimate that the Russian military may have suffered more than 100,000 casualties, and has seen its most modern and elite units decimated. Russia has also lost an unexpectedly high number of its best attack helicopters and fighter aircraft, making it even more difficult to turn back the Ukrainian offensive.

With winter arriving, it would be normal for the two armies to rest, consolidate their gains and prepare to fight again in the spring, especially in terrain where snow and mud will make maneuvering difficult for several months. So far, the Ukrainian military is defying those precedents, as it continues to attack Russian forces and reclaim lost territory. In response, the Russians are launching local counterattacks, digging in and bringing forward new conscripts to replenish their demoralized frontline forces. The Russians are also using drones and missiles to attack Ukraine's infrastructure and major cities in an attempt to break the Ukrainian people's will to resist by denying them heat, clean water and electricity.

The war in Ukraine is far from over and it would be foolish to make firm predictions about its outcome. But one thing is assured: This war will be studied for a long time as a type of lethal classroom where decades-old or centuries-old principles of strategy and tactics are being tested by the realities of the 21st-century battlefield.

Lawrence Freedman is one of the world's leading experts on foreign policy, war, strategy and international relations. He is emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London and the author of many books, including "Strategy: A History," "The Future of War" and "The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy." His new book is "Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine." Freedman's essays and other writing have been featured in such publications as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New Statesman and the Times (U.K.).

In this conversation, he explains how the Russian military disregarded the fundamental basics of military strategy in its war against Ukraine, which is why Russia faces defeat on the battlefield. Freedman also contends that, contrary to Vladimir Putin's assumptions, in attacking Ukraine he strengthened that nation's resolve, sense of national unity and will to resist. This is especially true of the terror bombing campaign against Ukraine, which Freedman argues will do little or nothing to advance Russia's strategic goals or win the war.

Freedman also ponders counterfactual scenarios about the Ukraine war. How would a general from another time period adapt to modern warfare as seen in Ukraine? What would they do differently, or do the same? Freedman also takes on a question that has been much discussed online and in other forums: What would happen if the Russian military directly engaged in battle against U.S. or NATO forces?

Toward the end of this conversation, Freedman explains that Vladimir Putin's failures in Ukraine are an example of a larger dynamic: Authoritarian and autocratic leaders consistently make poor decisions because they are insulated from reality and accurate information.

I have very mixed emotions about the war. First, I always feel a bit guilty because my life gets more interesting and enthralling, in a way, whenever something awful is going on. Wars make me busy. It would be nice if peace made me quite as busy. I have Ukrainian friends, and what they are going through is awful. But on the other hand, they've shown enormous resilience and have made remarkable progress in fighting the war. In the end, I hesitate to say that I am optimistic because it is dangerous to predict the future. Yes, the Ukrainians have the initiative in the war. But even then, more people are going to die, be made into refugees, and generally life is going to be hard for the Ukrainians for the foreseeable future.

What does it mean to be Ukrainian right now?

I have spoken to a number of Ukrainians about this question. My feeling is that they are experiencing a much stronger sense of national identity than before the war. The idea that the Ukrainians were distinct from Russia is not that new. But I think what's striking about their sentiments now, and we see it in all the polling, is that there is a much clearer sense of solidarity with each other and a belief in the state and in Ukraine's leaders.

How do you balance your intellectual interests and curiosity about war and armed conflict with seeing the human cost and reality of it?

I have followed a number of wars pretty closely throughout my long career. I try not to look at wars as some type of spectator sport: War is about violence. The war in Ukraine is different in several ways. First, the Russian tactics are clearly very brutal, as they were in Syria. The amount of information about what is happening day to day in Ukraine is much more, as compared to previous wars. What we can see about war is just much more immediate and intimate.

I started paying close attention to wars with the Falklands in 1982. The amount of information that was coming back at any time was very small. There was radio commentary and very little television coverage of the Falklands — and even that was out of date. With social media today and the internet I can see tanks being blown up and actually watch the soldiers scurrying away, trying not to die. This is unprecedented in many ways. It is all so much closer than before.

A person can literally watch the war in Ukraine in real time. It is dystopian, it feels like a science fiction movie. To me, it's very unsettling. Our culture is already violent enough without that level of desensitization.

Vietnam was described as the first television war. I remember the Tet Offensive in 1968, for example. There was an immediacy in the coverage of the war as long as the TV crews were there to transmit images in near-real time, which meant, as in Tet, that fighting was taking place in cities. For a lot of the time this was about counterinsurgency, as also in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is unusual about the war in Ukraine is that this is a conventional war, and one fought at high intensity This isn't a walkover. This is a very serious fight for both sides. Yes, there was all the media coverage of the Gulf War in 1991, but no one really thought the United States was going to lose.

But we should still be careful in how we understand all this footage coming back from the war in Ukraine because we are not seeing everything, and the coverage is inevitably selective by nature.

When you look at the war in Ukraine, what is the simple story, and what is the more complicated one?

The simple story is quite straightforward: Putin ordered his military to invade Ukraine on the basis of a total misapprehension of the country he was taking on. It was that error — presuming the country to be an ineffectual non-state ruled by an illegitimate government — which was used to justify the invasion in the first place. The reason the initial assaults by Russia failed was because of arrogance and an underestimation of the Ukrainians. The first moves by Russia failed, and they never really recovered from that. The Russians could not take Kyiv, and then we had the stage where they moved to the Donbas region. Western support started to come in and that moved us to the next stage of the war, from late July and August to the present, where the Ukrainians are taking the initiative because they have better equipment and supplies from America and NATO.

What is happening now in the war is very much the consequence of the Russians suffering shortages in manpower because they expended them — quite carelessly, in my opinion — early on. The Russians are pretty thinly defended now and are trying to bolster their ranks through mobilizing reserves and a de facto draft. The Russians have gradually become a 20th-century army, while the Ukrainians are gradually becoming a 21st-century one.

On another level, we are seeing a coercive Russian strategy against Ukrainian society. This involves a wide range of war crimes. Russia is also trying to turn off the power and electricity in Ukraine. The Ukrainians cannot do the same against the Russians in terms of targeting infrastructure. The Ukrainians are winning on the battlefield, but they cannot hit back against the Russians on that strategic level.

The Russian military has been exposed as a hollow force. Before the war in Ukraine, it had a fearsome reputation. Now the Russian military looks like it may collapse in Ukraine. Are there other historical examples of such a thing?

It does happen that armies, when they are properly tested, just collapse. It's not wholly unusual. That can happen because of a lack of supplies or from poor leadership. The Iraqi army in Desert Storm is an example of this. Before Desert Storm, the Iraqi army was talked about as the fourth-largest in the world, battle-hardened from their war against the Iranians. The Iraqis believed their own reputation. But in the end the Iraqi military could not oppose the combat power of the United States.

As for Russia, they did quite poorly in the first Chechen war. They went in arrogantly and got hammered by the Chechens. But that was explained as being caused by the end of the Cold War and a lack of funding for the Russian military, which was demoralized. Russia had time to rebuild its military afterwards, and it was assumed they had used the money from oil to modernize their forces.

I believe that Putin was misled by the fact that their recent military operations were successful, such as the second Chechen war, their intervention in Georgia and, in particular, taking Crimea and bullying the Ukrainians in 2014, followed by their actions in Syria. This led Putin to believe that the Russian military was competent and professional. Of course, that turned out to be incorrect. Moreover, the war in Ukraine is on a different scale. The Ukrainians are professional, motivated, well-trained, determined and are fighting back in a sophisticated and effective way. The Russian military was not prepared for such opposition.

What is new about what we are seeing, in terms of the operational art of war in Ukraine? What is old?

Much of what is taking place in Ukraine would make perfect sense to a World War II commander. Drones, the communications technology, the intelligence-gathering technology and the satellites would be quite awesome to them. But the basics of attrition and maneuver and of where you hold the line and where you don't hold the line, especially the importance of logistics, are timeless. On that point, the Russians have really encountered problems with the basics of logistics. Keeping supply lines open is just fundamental to war.

The war in Ukraine is on a much smaller scale than what we saw in World War II. But the fundamentals are much the same. What is different from previous decades, and World War II in particular, is the precision of modern weapons. The Russians had a number of precision-guided weapons, but they did not use them effectively in the early stages of the war. Instead of hitting military targets, the Russians used them against civilian targets. That was painful for the Ukrainians, but it did not actually help Russia on the battlefield. By comparison, the Ukrainians have used the American HIMARS system and other long-range weapons to focus on specific targets of value, as opposed to the Russians. The Ukrainians have learned to use drones and other intelligence assets and specific targeting information very effectively. It really is quite impressive.

Many different narratives are being imposed on the war in Ukraine. Many of them are premature. One I have been following closely in the mainstream media is that Javelin and other ATGMs have somehow made the tank obsolete. That is an old and repeatedly disproved claim. What are your thoughts?

The tank has always been a subject of debate. For example, in the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973, many tanks were lost. How? From other tanks. The main anti-tank weapon is often another tank. The fact is, if you want to move a distance with firepower and have a degree of protection over difficult terrain, it is going to end up looking like a tank. Anything can be vulnerable on the modern battlefield, because if you can be seen you can be hit. That having been said, you still need to move people and firepower on the battlefield. Of course there are forms of deception and finding cover and using artillery and infantry to screen and protect your forces from short-range anti-tank systems.

This is why combined arms is critical on the modern battlefield; every system has a role to play. You can't isolate the tank and say that it's gone and everything else stays. There is always going to be a role for tanks. Will the balance of systems on the battlefield change in the future? Of course. UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] are now being used instead of manned aircraft for certain missions. But that doesn't mean you get rid of manned aircraft, because they can do things that a UAV can't. You use the best system for the mission.

Russia is waging a terror campaign using drones, missiles and artillery against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. What do we actually know about the effectiveness of targeting civilians as part of a larger strategy to win a war?

Unfortunately, we know a great deal about this. This is a political question about terrorizing populations and whether to do so or not. The question is: Does targeting civilians and population centers actually make the public turn on their own government?

The Allies during the Second World War did terrible things against German cities, especially toward the end. But there wasn't much that the German people could do about it. They lacked the means to change their government. In the case of Ukraine, there's absolutely no evidence that the attacks on civil society have made a difference to popular support, if anything, the Russian attacks have encouraged popular support for the war. Attacking civilian populations can backfire in that way. Terror bombing and attacking civil society does not necessarily gain the attacker a political victory.

What are some of the main things the Russian military has done incorrectly in the execution of their war in Ukraine? By comparison, what have the Ukrainians done right?

The Russians' main error is that they strategically underestimated their opponent. That is always a basic mistake: Never underestimate your enemy. The Russians also did not have enough infantry and manpower, more generally. They do not give enough autonomy and flexibility to junior officers and others lower down the chain of command to make decisions, improvise and address problems.

The Russians also failed to anticipate what the Ukrainians could do with accurate artillery. The Russians didn't disperse their ammunition enough. The Russian logistics system was too rigid, which makes it an easy target. What did the Ukrainians do right? They delegated initiative to quite small groups of forces and junior officers. The Ukrainians had to rely on taking the initiative against the Russians; that was central to their strategy and tactics.

The Ukrainians have not wasted their weaponry. They have thought hard about the targets that they most need to hit. When possible and where it made sense, the Ukrainians have used maneuver warfare to encircle the Russians rather than go directly at them in frontal assaults. The Ukrainians' ability to maneuver and encircle the Russians has caused them to panic — it'a demoralizing. In total, the Ukrainians have waged a very astute campaign against the Russians.

Armchair generals and other students of military history love counterfactuals and "what if" scenarios. One of those scenarios we see in response to the war in Ukraine is that the U.S. military and NATO would easily destroy the Russians in a conventional war. I am suspicious of such a conclusion, because in my opinion the Russian military and its leadership would approach such a scenario much differently than they did with Ukraine. How do you assess that counterfactual?

We just don't know. Counterfactuals are useful for testing theories of causation. What variable made the difference? If the Russians genuinely thought they were protecting their homeland, what we are seeing with Ukraine might have turned out differently. The Ukrainians are much more motivated in this fight than the Russians. Nuclear weapons are a variable here too. If the Russians really did think they were fighting for their own territory, they'd be much more likely to use nuclear weapons if they were losing. I am of the mind that the Russians still won't do such a thing in this conflict. Those types of questions can be explored using counterfactuals.

To answer your question, in a straight fight between the Americans and the Russians, the Americans would have won. American equipment, supplies and overall forces are just that much better. One of the surprising things about the war in Ukraine is the limited impact of Russian airpower. By comparison, the Americans would dominate the battlefield with their airpower — or at least would try to do so. We reasonably assumed that the Russians would do this in Ukraine. They weren't able to do it. If the Russians cannot dominate the Ukrainians with airpower, they would not be able to do it against the Americans.

The United States does not lose conventional battles very often. The United States does have difficulty with insurgencies, because in the end it is not worth the effort. Americans get impatient. In the end, the Americans would not have had much trouble with the Russian military that we are seeing in Ukraine.

What are some of the lessons from the war in Ukraine for NATO members and European militaries?

The Americans are going to fight in all domains. The British, the Germans and the French, for example, are not going to fight in all domains in the same way. They must think as an alliance: The European countries are not able to do everything on their own. A huge lesson from the war in Ukraine is that the intensity of modern warfare means you go through material and supplies very quickly. The stockpiles are never sufficient. The NATO countries have greatly depleted their supplies supporting Ukraine.

That means more resources are going to be put into building back up supplies. This means more ammunition, shells, rockets, missiles and the like for the future. This is not a new lesson, but it has to be relearned. Logistics are critical because even if you are making more ammunition and other supplies, you still have to get it all to the front.

Your new book focuses on command and leadership. What does the war in Ukraine tell us about Vladimir Putin?

Autocrats tend to make very bad decisions. Democracies make bad decisions too, but the difference is that autocracies believe in the possibility of big, bold, decisive moves, and they don't have people who dare to warn them about all that can go wrong. There are sycophantic advisers who don't dare to criticize the autocratic leader. This can cause horrible outcomes.

What's happened in Ukraine is a good example of how autocrats make mistakes. This war was Putin's decision. Putin had a theory about Ukraine, and did not confirm that theory with real experts who would tell him that he was wrong. Putin believed that Ukraine would crumble if pushed hard enough, and that turned out to be very wrong.

Today's Republican Party has effectively become an authoritarian political cult led by Donald Trump. His millions of followers — with their votes, money, menace and potential or actual violence — have become his primary means of controlling the party and progressively undermining American democracy and society.

When Trump first emerged as a serious presidential candidate in 2016, Republican leaders and other right-wing elites believed they could control him and use him as a weapon in their revolutionary and reactionary struggle. They were both right and wrong about that.

Donald Trump is a political monster; Such leaders and forces have a mind and will all their own.

As president, Trump enacted policies that the Republican Party and larger white right have long dreamed of imposing on the American people, most notably rolling back taxes on the rich and seizing full control of the Supreme Court. That was a great victory in the long-term campaign to reverse the civil rights victories of the 20th and 21st century won by Black and brown people, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and other marginalized groups.

But Donald Trump quickly become more powerful than the Republican Party, and not necessarily aligned with its leaders. His followers are far more loyal to him than to the party itself. When Trump and his followers attempted a violent coup on Jan. 6, 2021, many "mainstream" Republicans struggled to adjust to this new reality. Many people in the party understood that Trump was a fascist, perhaps a traitor and in a larger sense an existential threat to the United States. Within the Trump administration, there were discussions about removing him from office through the 25th Amendment. But ultimately most Republicans chose partisanship and power over genuine patriotism and the common good. In doing so, they made themselves de facto agents of American neofascism.

There were a few "traditional" Republicans and "principled" conservatives throughout the Trump years who for a variety of reasons spoke out against Donald Trump and walked away from the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. George Conway III was one of the loudest of those voices. He is a lawyer, a contributing columnist at the Washington Post and a founding member of the Lincoln Project. (He resigned from that organization in 2020 to spend more time with his family.)

Conway is a longtime Republican who left the party in 2018. By his own account, he was a candidate for various high-level positions in the Justice Department under the Trump administration. He is married to Kellyanne Conway, who was an adviser to Trump from 2017 to 2020.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Conway explains his belief that Donald Trump may finally be prosecuted, convicted and perhaps even imprisoned for violations of the Espionage Act and related crimes. Contrary to the opinions of other legal experts and political observers, Conway believes that Trump's ego will never permit him to admit guilt as part of a plea bargain agreement. He warns, however, that as Trump faces more pressure from the Department of Justice and other investigations into his obvious criminal wrongdoing, he may order his followers to unleash violence and destruction.

Conway also reflects on his own previous level of denial about the danger to the country embodied by Trump and the Republican fascist movement — and discusses how he went from thinking that Democrats and other members of "the left" were "hysterical" to realizing that their warnings were largely correct.

Toward the end of this conversation, Conway predicts that if Donald Trump faces incarceration or other serious punishment, he will turn against the Republican Party and seek to destroy it in an act of revenge. Ultimately, Trump's lasting legacy may be the destruction of the Republican Party as the political monster turns against its host and creator.

How are you feeling, given the country's democracy crisis and the rising neofascist tide? How do you make sense of all this?

I do think it's going to get better. But it's going to get worse before it gets better. Trump is basically a cornered animal. He's got all these legal proceedings bearing down on him. In addition, he is losing his touch and his connection to his public, because his act has become very tiresome. That explains why Trump is embracing the QAnon conspiracy. He's doing that because of his narcissism: He's feeling attacked, and for the first time in his life, he is facing real consequences for his actions. The DOJ and other investigations have caused Trump to suffer a narcissistic injury. He is a pathological narcissist, and by going to the QAnon people he is getting attention and his need for narcissistic fuel is being somewhat satisfied. That also explains why Trump would never criticize the QAnon conspiracy cult before. He likes people who like him. That is what really matters to him.

Trump is in a downward psychological, emotional and physical spiral. His embrace of QAnon shows how extreme his deterioration is. But here is the problem for the rest of us: Donald Trump is not going to go away immediately. He is going to try to use the electoral process, and threats of violence, to regain power and influence. Then Trump will say that he can't control what people do because they are so angry at how he is being treated by Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, the DOJ, the various prosecutors and judges, the news media and so on. Trump is going to make things much worse in this country before things finally get better.

If America were actually healthy, then Trump would be gone, a non-factor. In all likelihood, I believe that Trump gets the Republican nomination in 2024, unless he goes to prison before then. If Trump is convicted or it looks like he is going to be, he will try to take down as many people as possible with him. That's what malignant narcissists do.

There are all these pronouncements from pundits that Trump is done for and everything is going to be OK. That's wishful thinking. Trumpism and neofascism cannot just be wished away.

I hear you, but I believe we should take some solace, in that the reckoning is finally coming. At the very least, the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation is the most dangerous thing facing him. Almost from the moment it came out, I felt it was the shortest distance between him and an orange jumpsuit, for the simple reason that it is a simple case.

The analogy I like to use is this: Let's imagine that you are the U.S. attorney in New York, and you're investigating a mob boss. You're putting together a massive RICO case with lots of crimes involved, such as murders and gambling and loan sharking. It's a complicated case and all of a sudden you get a phone call that there is a jewel heist at Kennedy Airport. Guess who is driving the truck? The Don, the boss. That's almost literally what happened with Mar-a-Lago.

Given the details of the case and all the related charges, I don't know how the DOJ doesn't prosecute Trump. And I don't know how Trump is not convicted, especially if he is tried in the District of Columbia. I think the danger is going to come from the fact that the legal process will take at least a year. With all the other legal peril Trump is facing, he is going to threaten violence as a way of getting out of trouble. I don't know whether or not he will be as successful as he was on Jan. 6, but there is going to be some real pain in this country caused by Trump calling for violence by his followers.

Trump is also going to cause damage to the Republican Party. The party is finally going to realize that Trump will take them down with him. It is going to be very ugly all around. In the end, though, it will get better. Once Trump is dealt with, there's the other problem that must be confronted: Trump let all the termites into the basement of the house. The Big Lie and the election deniers and all the assorted lunatics who have taken up residence in the Republican Party and are now its base must be pushed out. We need two functioning, normal political parties that support democracy in this country. Right now, we only have one, and that is the Democrats. I don't know what's going to happen next — perhaps the Republican Party will collapse and something better will replace it.

Didn't Donald Trump simply give Republicans and so-called conservatives permission to be their true selves? This didn't happen overnight. How do you explain it?

There was always that radical extremist fringe on the right. That element did not dominate the Republican Party. Trump took advantage of that extreme element. The mainstream Republicans got pushed aside by a base that had become whipped up into frenzy by the extremists. Trump took advantage of that opening.

The right-wing media ecosystem is also a large part of the extremist turn, because it found a way to make money by dragging people farther and farther away from reality and creating a thirst for disinformation and hatred. White baby boomers who are feeling angry and resentful about how the country is changing demographically are also part of that extremist turn and the rise of Trump. There are many variables at play here, and it's going to take a long time to sort it all out.

Donald Trump is much more than a man. He is a symbol and an idea. What comes after him could be even more dangerous.

That is the big danger. We could end up with someone who is as manipulative as Trump, but a lot smarter. As a country, we have been very lucky that Donald Trump is not that smart. He is very impulsive and not contemplative or strategic. What happens if next time there is a demagogue who is as immoral as Trump, but far more intelligent?

How do you make sense of Trump's corrupting power? Why are people so attracted to him?

There are different explanations for the various groups of people on the right. Some of them overlap. But we should try to be specific. If you're talking about the political class, the Republican leadership, they're partly motivated by fear. Survival drives them. Republican elected officials know that if they say anything against Trump, they may lose their primaries. Staying in office is what drives them. They don't want to end up like Liz Cheney. She tells stories about how there were so many Republican senators who would walk up to her and say, "Thank you for doing what you're doing." Those same Republican senators would then do nothing to defend her publicly, because they're afraid of Trump and his voters.

The right-wing media makes money off Trump and all the conflict. The political consultants are afraid of losing business and money if they cross Trump and his base. There's a lot of intimidation involved. As for Trump's voters and followers, many of them are not that educated or choose to insulate themselves in the right-wing echo chamber, where they are fed lies and disinformation and rage. They choose to seal themselves off from reality. That's a type of collective narcissism. One way that Donald Trump sucks people in is that his voters and followers don't like the people who are criticizing him. Therefore they defend Trump no matter what — even if what he is doing is obviously wrong and indefensible. Trump's people do not want to admit that they are morally wrong.

As a society, what do we do about the Trump cult?

I honestly don't know. I'm just hoping that at some point it will exhaust itself and fade away. But that is not going to happen for a while, if at all. The only thing the rest of who are not in the Trump cult can do is to keep telling the truth.

I have a related concern. One of the problems right now on the left — and I understand the root of the sentiment — is that when a Republican or someone else on the right finally sees the light about Trump, there is a tendency to call them hypocrites, to attack them for supporting Trump and being a Republican. People attack Liz Cheney that way, saying that she voted for Trump and supported his policies. That's true. But when people see the light, you have to encourage them. You don't have to give them a pass for what they did in the past, but you should praise them for doing the right thing now by standing up against Trump and what he represents.

It's hard for a person to turn against Trump and leave the Republican Party. They are losing their friends and social network. The party was their home. We all tend to do what other people around us do. We want to be accepted by them. As human beings, we don't like to admit our mistakes.

Reflecting on my own behavior, I thoroughly own up to the fact that I voted for Donald Trump and supported him in 2016. That was a grave moral error on my part, and I own it. I'm happy — well, not happy, but willing — to admit my error. But the fact is, that some people can't do it that easily.

For my part, I engaged in wishful thinking. I truly thought that once Trump was president he would have some type of realization or epiphany about what that responsibility meant. I really thought that Trump would become a better person. Now I see that was an insane thing to believe. It was ridiculous. I was engaging in wishful thinking, and by doing that I was projecting my idealistic values about patriotism and love of country and selflessness onto Trump, who will never comprehend these values.

I finally realized that there is something deeply wrong with Donald Trump. I am not trained as a psychologist; I don't really understand how a mind like his works. But I've read about Hitler, Stalin and other tyrants. I didn't make the initial connection between them and Trump, but after a while I finally did.

Given that you know many of the people involved, why did these Republican elites, insiders, journalists and the like not tell the truth about how dangerous Trump really was? They were there. They witnessed it all. They told people in private that Trump was unhinged and unfit. Yet, they kept quiet — and then wrote books about it.

That has been the biggest revelation for me. I had thought that if Trump turned out to be as bad as people on the left were saying, then he would be cast aside by the Republicans and his inner circle. I naively thought that I would help encourage people to speak up by speaking out myself. By and large, most Republicans and other conservatives just stuck their heads in the sand. For me, that was one of the most shocking things about the last few years. There are so many different reasons that people don't do the right thing. As all these books by journalists are now revealing, people close to Trump knew how dangerous he is, and did nothing.

What does it mean to be a Republican right now?

I don't think it really means anything right now. For a lot of people, it means supporting Trump. That's one of the main reasons why I left the Republican Party and registered as an unaffiliated voter in March of 2018. At that point it was clear to me that the Republican Party had become a Trump personality cult. Four years later, it's much worse. I don't know what the Republican Party stands for now, other than placating Trump and opposing anything that the Democrats do just for the sake of opposing them. There are no real principles involved. The Republican Party doesn't even stand for America's national interests anymore. Look at what some Republicans have been saying about Russia's war against Ukraine.

How do we balance political expediency versus legal necessity? The law takes time, but Donald Trump is an imminent danger to American society right now. Something needs to be done, and we are running out of time.

At the end of the day, we have to follow the legal system and apply it evenhandedly — but that should be done as expeditiously as possible. The Justice Department has clearly come around to that understanding. They are now expanding their investigations of Jan. 6, Trump's other alleged crimes and related matters at the highest levels. I don't think it's going to take them very long to put together a case on the classified documents. And I don't think they have a choice, even if they wanted to resist prosecuting him. It's going to be sooner rather than later. Trump could easily be under both federal and state indictment at some point between Election Day [Nov. 8] and New Year's Day.

What do you think is going to happen with these criminal cases? Does he take a plea bargain? There's this fantasy among some liberal folks that Trump does a perp walk and goes to prison. I don't see that happening. If anything, Trump pays fines and takes a plea deal. Merrick Garland and the DOJ will not put a former president in prison.

I don't believe that Trump is going to plea bargain. I think he could go to prison, but it is more likely that he will serve home confinement. In all likelihood, he will be convicted of multiple felonies. I don't know if there's ever going to be a perp walk, but I don't think it's a fantasy either. There's a good chance that Trump will end up with a felony conviction. I know he has cut deals in civil cases, but that's just writing checks. To reiterate, I do not believe that Trump will plead out. This all goes so much to the core of Trump's identity that he will try to tear the country apart before he settles one of these criminal cases.

That is a powerful statement.

Donald Trump will incite violence on his behalf. He will try to pretend it is something spontaneous. Does Trump have enough power and influence over his followers to threaten the republic? I don't think so. But I do think it's enough to be dangerous. Trump has enough influence that people could get hurt.

What are you most concerned about? And what, if anything, are you hopeful about, regarding the country's future?

What keeps me up at night is the violence that Trump could potentially cause. The danger of violence will increase as the 2024 election approaches. What gives me hope is that the legal reckoning is coming. Donald Trump has brought many people together. That is one of the great ironies of all this. People on the left and right have come together to oppose Trump and his movement. I am hopeful that the American people will be so exhausted by this whole saga that they will be drawn toward all the things that tie us together as a nation and people. Of course we may disagree with one another, and do so passionately. But in the end we are all Americans, and we have more in common than divides us. I hope we can get back to that and heal after Trump.

America's democracy crisis will not end anytime soon. Donald Trump and his acolytes in the Republican-fascist party continue to incite acts of right-wing violence, including terrorism, on a nationwide scale as part of their plan to end American democracy and replace it with authoritarianism and one-party rule.

The Big Lie continues to spread across the United States. A majority of Republicans now subscribe to the repeatedly disproven theory that the 2020 Election was somehow illegitimate, that Trump is the "real" president and Joe Biden is a pretender and usurper. "MAGA" is American neofascism; it has fully conquered the Republican Party.

America's democracy crisis will not end anytime soon. Donald Trump and his acolytes in the Republican-fascist party continue to incite acts of right-wing violence, including terrorism, on a nationwide scale as part of their plan to end American democracy and replace it with authoritarianism and one-party rule.

The Big Lie continues to spread across the United States. A majority of Republicans now subscribe to the repeatedly disproven theory that the 2020 Election was somehow illegitimate, that Trump is the "real" president and Joe Biden is a pretender and usurper. "MAGA" is American neofascism; it has fully conquered the Republican Party.

This moment of crisis demands bold, immediate leadership and collective action, not just from Biden and other leading Democrats but from rank-and-file-Americans as well. But the urgency of stopping Trump and his forces is hamstrung by how the rule of law in a democracy operates slowly and justice often takes a very long time — if it ever does arrive.

Will Donald Trump eventually be prosecuted, convicted and then imprisoned for his apparent high crimes, which may include violating the Espionage Act? Attorney and author Kenneth Foard McCallion believes that the answer is probably no.

McCallion is a former Justice Department prosecutor who also worked for the New York State Attorney General's office as a prosecutor on Trump racketeering cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney and special assistant U.S. attorney, he focused on international fraud and counterintelligence cases that often involved Russian organized crime.

McCallion is also the author of several books, including "Profiles in Cowardice in the Trump Era" and "Treason & Betrayal: The Rise and Fall of Individual-1."

In this wide-ranging conversation, he offers his view that Donald Trump, along with his inner circle and his businesses, operate like an organized crime family. McCallion says these attributes and behavior help to explain Trump's affinity for foreign demagogues and other corrupt elements, including Eastern European and Russian criminal organizations.

McCallion reflects on his personal experience prosecuting Trump and his organizations, and the challenges of going up against a man he describes as a likely sociopath and a skilled pathological liar.

McCallion explains the approach that Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice will likely take in prosecuting Trump for the government documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago and the events of Jan. 6. Any such prosecution will require both overwhelming irrefutable evidence and a simple and direct story to tell a jury about Trump's misdeeds. McCallion also says that contrary to some media reports, Trump can definitely still be prosecuted even if he announces he is running for president.

Toward the end of this conversation, McCallion outlines a likely scenario for the final disposition of such a prosecution. He believes that Trump may be brought down by a litany of civil lawsuits that will cripple him financially, not by a high-profile criminal case in which the former president is "perp-walked" in handcuffs and then sent to prison.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling, given everything that's happening? With your expertise and experience, how do you process all these events? What are you seeing?

The next book I'm working on is actually titled "Civil War II," but the ending is yet to be written. Over the last few weeks, I've been shocked at the extent of what we are learning about the Espionage Act and the hiding of secret government documents by Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Why did he do that? I don't know. But I do believe that kind of hubris, and that inability to really let go of the mantel of the presidency, may in the end be his undoing. Trump has certainly left himself open for being prosecuted for serious crimes related to espionage and various other things.

There are encouraging signs. I was quite delighted that a friend and former mentor of mine, Raymond Dearie, who is a retired district judge from the Eastern District of New York, where I was in the U.S. attorney's office, will most likely be the special master [reviewing the Mar-a-Lago documents]. I was worried that the Justice Department and the attorney general had dozed off and napped for several months, but it appears they are hard at work now.

The Jan. 6 committee really gave the Department of Justice a lot of impetus and momentum. There are also good indications that justice may actually be done with the New York attorney general's [civil] case, and perhaps the Manhattan DA's [criminal] case too.

Is there actually anything shocking about any of the things Trump and his allies have done? Donald Trump has been a public criminal for decades. Jan. 6 was in many ways a predictable event and was announced beforehand. My point of view is pretty simple. We know who Donald Trump is. There is a long pattern of his evil behavior. What is "shocking" about any of this? He is utterly predictable.

Those of us who know Donald Trump also understand that he is probably beyond reformation and may actually be psychopathic. However, I think it's important to say that Donald Trump's behavior and presidency, and what he continues to do, has been a shock to the democratic system. We cannot lose the capacity to be outraged at Trump's behavior. We need to have that sense of outrage in order to protect the country's democratic institutions, which are under attack right now.

Where are the consequences for Donald Trump and his apparent criminal acts and other wrongdoing?

I do believe that the Justice Department probably should have moved much faster with the Mar-a-Lago documents, given that we are entering an election season. However, we need to uphold the principle that no man is above the law no matter what time of year it may be, political happenings or not.

It's never a convenient season for the rich and powerful to be held accountable. It's almost a perfect storm at this point between the Department of Justice investigation, the New York attorney general's investigation and various civil suits against Trump. The pot is boiling now in several different respects. One or more of these investigations will almost certainly lead to the undoing of the Trump Organization.

There is also significant personal liability for Donald Trump for the obstruction of justice and for a long list of crimes that are now being investigated. Attorney General Garland and the Justice Department really have to follow through this investigation to its logical conclusion. The evidence is overwhelming. Any honest prosecutor is not going to want to say, "I pulled my punches," or, "I let Donald Trump go just because he's the former president."

You have a lot of experience with Donald Trump. You faced him and his organization as a prosecutor. When you saw his candidacy in 2016 and then saw him win the election, what were you most afraid of?

I worked with the organized crime section of the Justice Department when I went up against Donald Trump and his lawyer, Roy Cohn. We were primarily investigating labor racketeering, involving unions that were dominated by various organized crime families, including the Teamsters and others. In our investigation, we found that Donald Trump and some other developers used their connections with organized crime to get immunity from strikes by entering into corrupt contracts — promising "no-show" jobs, for example. These corrupt contracts gave Trump and others a competitive advantage.

It quickly occurred to us, and I think it's apparent to all of us now, that Trump and his organization are just another organized crime family. They try to maintain the code of silence, but that hasn't been entirely successful. There is a complete disregard for the law. In terms of fraudulent intent, even if they could have made money honestly, Trump and his people — like many organized crime-controlled companies — try to cut corners.

They take advantage of their connections with organized crime and their connections with corrupt foreign leaders, such as Putin. Russian organized crime always had a very close connection with the Trump organization. After Trump's casinos in Atlantic City went under and the banks started pulling back their financing, Trump and his organization and his development projects have been financed through shady money from Eastern Europe and Russia, from the oligarchs.

They have been Trump's lifeblood for his financing. His worldview has always been oriented towards the countries where oligarchs and dirty money are prevalent. Donald Trump was dead set on attempting to convert the United States into a replica, to some extent, of the antidemocratic, authoritarian, oligarchical systems we see in Hungary, Russia and various other parts of Eastern Europe.

Given your experience with Trump, what did the news media and the American public fail to understand about this man? Or perhaps, what were they afraid to acknowledge?

Many people naively thought that Trump, despite his outlandish behavior, was just being hyperbolic and not seriously intentioned. What they didn't realize is that Trump bought into his own nonsensical worldview. Millions of adoring people worship Donald Trump — as he has said, he really could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and his followers would still love him.

Did Trump really believe that the election was stolen from him in 2020? The frightening thing is that Trump has not only convinced many of his followers of that, he has probably convinced himself of that, which makes him the most dangerous kind of dictator or autocrat. He has lost all sense of any ability to pull back from the brink. Donald Trump is not restrained by any of the guardrails of our normal democratic processes. He and Steve Bannon and the rest of that inner circle have brought the United States to somewhere quite different than this country's ever been before.

But in the end, I do believe that the pendulum will swing back, much as it did with, for example, Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s with his Red scare. I truly think the wheel will turn and we're not going to go over the cliff.

Where does that hope and belief come from? Trump has escaped responsibility for decades.

As bad as things are now, and as divided as the country is, there have been other times in our past where we have faced great difficulties. Yet somehow we survived the turmoil and the storms and got to a better place. I think it's a constant struggle. We are in the midst of one of those fundamental struggles, with Trump and his movement and the assault on democracy and the rule of law.

As you said, Merrick Garland could have moved earlier. I'm one of the people who wondered what the hell he was waiting for: Lock him up! Help me understand what the law requires, versus what political expediency demands.

The Department of Justice has to be thorough here. When I was with the Department of Justice, as a young prosecutor, I'd be anxious to bring organized crime figures to trial. But like Trump, many heads of crime families delegate the dirty work to other people. So to nail Trump and hold him responsible beyond a reasonable doubt, you really don't want to leave anything to chance. You need overwhelming evidence.

I think we're really getting to the point where we have that critical mass, especially after the Mar-a-Lago search and the documents obtained there. That was a fumble by Trump on the five-yard line. He might well have gotten away with not facing a criminal indictment for all he had done before that, but he had the audacity and the hubris to take top secret government documents with him after leaving office.

People of ambition and of monumental ego, like Donald Trump, have blind spots. Trump is bringing himself down. What I really fear is that a smarter Trump-like figure, maybe like Ron DeSantis, could actually do a lot more damage than Donald Trump.

In my view, Trump is a criminal genius. When you go up against somebody like that in court, how do you prepare?

When I did my cases, it was much like building a brick house. You have to do it from the foundation up, but there's always a moment when a prosecutor has butterflies in his stomach. When you have to cross-examine a Trump-like figure or the head of an organized crime family or someone of that type more generally, there is anxiety even when you have overwhelming evidence against them

Remember, these people are pathological liars. I'm sure that Donald Trump, if he was given a polygraph, would pass with flying colors. It's a matter of experience, plus a natural sociopathic ability to lie.

Trump's had a lot of experience with lying and the courts. He has some pretty good counsel, but I think over the next few months that most of the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago are going to be turned back over to the Justice Department. We'll see the wheels of justice continue at that point. Letitia James, the attorney general in New York, will get a very solid result against the Trump Organization, as will the DA in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg. Those cases are not against Trump personally, but against his organization. His chief lieutenants will be brought down and face very substantial fines for their economic and financial sleight of hand.

What do you think the approach to prosecuting Trump will be? The evidence seems overwhelming, but nothing's decided until you're in court.

It has to be laid out very simply for the jurors. It's basically two plus two equals four. You have Trump with these documents, some of them in a basement, but some of these top-secret documents were found by the FBI next to his passport in a private part of his desk. These documents were close to him every day. Trump certainly had knowledge and awareness of the documents; he knew they were top secret. He knew they had been taken from the White House. I think that you would just put it to a jury that you don't leave your common sense and good reason at the door when you are sworn in as a juror.

We spend our entire lives evaluating people, separating truths from falsehoods and connecting the dots. It's much the same way that organized crime figures were brought down. Al Capone, for example, was put in prison not for the many murders he committed, but for tax fraud. With Trump, it will be the same thing. It's a very simple story you can tell. With top secret documents, the story tells itself.

What do you think Trump was doing with the top secret and other highly classified documents?

Actually, on this point, I give Trump somewhat the benefit of the doubt. I think his ego would not let him leave all the trappings of power back in the White House. In his mind, he had to take something. Now, did he foreclose the issue of selling the documents for money if necessary, or using them for political purposes? Those avenues were available to him as well, but I doubt Trump had a clear-cut plan. He knew they were top secret documents and he took them. It is not a requirement that the prosecution establish his intent, other than an intent and a willfulness to keep top secret documents out of the government archives and in his own personal possession. Mar-a-Lago is a place that is crawling with potential spies, Chinese and otherwise.

Donald Trump engaged in a flagrant violation of his national duty. That willfulness and intent and recklessness is, I believe, sufficient for a criminal conviction.

So how do you approach finding a jury where you won't have one person who is going to nullify in Trump's favor. That's the practical problem. Is it possible to find an honest jury that is not tainted by Trumpists?

In jury selection, I always tell a client: You're never going to get the jury that you want, but you want a jury that's going to call the balls and strikes the way they really are. You don't want jurors who are dead set against you and supporting the opposition. Through your jury challenges, you can just weed out those people as best you can. You have to keep in mind that a lot of people underestimate jurors. For example, in the Paul Manafort trial some of those jurors were actually predisposed to be favorable to Donald Trump's worldview. Yet they found that Paul Manafort had violated the law on several counts and should be held liable under the criminal laws.

The jury system is a risky one. It's somewhat of a mystery, even to me, with all my decades of experience. But by and large, the guilty are convicted and the innocent can go free in our system, with some notable exceptions of course. Some jurors are reached by external forces, organized crime, political or otherwise. But by and large, I think the system is more or less equitable. It will be a great day for the justice system when Trump and some of his chief lieutenants are held accountable.

How do you explain to the average person what a RICO case is? How would you approach that type of prosecution in the case of Trump?

The racketeering laws are extremely flexible. It is much like describing an organized crime family that has a certain structure. The person at the top is calling the shots and the other members may not know what each of the others are doing. However, they subscribe to and agree with the overarching principles and goals of the organized crime family. In this case, that is to keep Donald Trump and his minions in power, to hold onto the White House through means fair and foul — primarily foul. Trump and his minions reject the basic norms of democracy.

They've used mail and wire fraud and engaged in various other violations of federal and state law over an extended period of time as well. That is really the informal definition of a racketeering conspiracy. Trump and his minions have engaged in that behavior.

But I think that Garland and the Justice Department may well steer clear of an extremely complex RICO-type case and just go with some very pointed, targeted violations. These violations are clear: espionage and various other laws. There are the facts and evidence to support racketeering and conspiracy charges. But the problem is that the more you complexify a case, the more likely it is to run on for weeks. Jurors are human beings; you can start losing some of them.

In my opinion, the Garland Justice Department learned a lot from the Jan. 6 committee hearings. It's probably going to follow that more simplified, direct, powerful route in bringing its prosecutions.

What can the Department of Justice prove conclusively about Donald Trump in order to hold him criminally accountable? It is easy to list all of Trump's acts of perfidy, immortality and wrongdoing, but that may not be enough to prosecute and convict him. It may all be wrong, but is it clearly illegal?

I think the Justice Department is going to focus on two scenarios. One will be the events leading up to Jan. 6. The coordinating and fundraising, the attack on the Capitol, the attempted election subversion and related happenings. The Justice Department has built a pretty strong case that Trump was the lead instigator of that demonstration and the assault on Congress. The other focus will be on the Espionage Act and related charges regarding the documents at Mar-a-Lago.

What does the Department of Justice do if and when Trump announces that he is running for president? Do they have to hold off for another four years if he wins?

If the Department of Justice gets an indictment, it should happen sometime later this year. They wouldn't do it in the window from now to November, the political season, but maybe the end of this year or early next year. One of the things people don't realize, and maybe Trump doesn't realize, is that once he declares for the presidency he will not have the Republican National Committee and other groups paying for his legal defense at that particular point. Trump is an extremely cheap individual who will have to pay out of pocket for millions of dollars in legal fees.

The Justice Department will not stop or pause, except for the political season in the midterms. They will not stand down just because Trump is a presidential candidate. Whether he is a presidential candidate or not, Trump and his supporters are still going to say it's a political prosecution.

The best defense for Trump is to attack the prosecutors. The prosecutors have to take a few punches and be vilified in the press, as they were after the Mar-a-Lago search. Although he waited too long, Merrick Garland did hold a press conference, as well he should have. The Justice Department is not a punching bag. It's entitled to protect itself and its reputation.

Many observers are claiming that if Trump announces his candidacy, the Department of Justice will not proceed with prosecuting him because of some type of informal rule or guideline. Garland and the DOJ will pause everything at that point, and perhaps drop it entirely, because to prosecute a presidential candidate would look too "political."

Absolutely not. If they did such a thing, they would be violating their oaths and professional ethics. The rest of the country would be wondering why there's one set of laws for us and another set of law for Trump and his kind.

What happens if Donald Trump is prosecuted and not convicted? What are the next steps, as a legal matter?

I can see the O.J. Simpson scenario playing out here. O.J. beat the criminal rap, but he was done in by the civil cases. Although there's a focus on the Department of Justice investigation, there are a host of civil cases out there against Trump. Trump will be involved in litigation for years, whether or not he beats a criminal rap.

Many people with public platforms keep proclaiming that Donald Trump is going to jail. That it's inevitable and we are eventually going to see Trump do a perp walk. Is he going to jail, in any version of this universe? What are the real range of practical or realistic consequences for him?

If I were a betting man, I would not put the odds on Donald Trump being handcuffed and perp-walked with the press photographing him on the way to a jail cell. The Justice Department has to pursue the investigation to an indictment and then prosecute it. As you know, not every case reaches trial. There is always the possibility of plea deals. Yes, it is conceivable that Donald Trump might do some time. But it's more likely that there would be some sort of plea deal to some of these offenses, in order for Trump to avoid a jail sentence. Trump would have to allow himself to actually admit guilt for some of these crimes.

In the real world, yes, some of the guilty do escape justice. But with the focus on Trump and the evidence that's available, I believe there will be a day of reckoning. Exactly what the consequences are after that is anybody's guess.

Here is my best-case scenario. Donald Trump takes a plea offer. There are some fines and he agrees to not run for public office again. But he then continues to be a public menace, agitating for right-wing terrorism, threatening democracy, repeating Jan. 6 and inciting other unrest. But what message is sent if the Department of Justice makes a deal with him? If Trump is not convicted and put in jail, what does that mean for the future of the country?

Keeping Trump from the White House again is a real benefit to the country. He'd have to agree to that in any plea deal. Trump would have to explicitly promise not to run for public office again. Will he continue to agitate and attempt to grab press headlines? Of course, but the Republican Party and his followers, at some point, have to move on. Donald Trump has had his moment. In the end, the country will get past Donald Trump.

The numerous catastrophes of the Age of Trump could all have been averted, or greatly mitigated. But too many Americans, including at the highest levels of government and society, instead chose to remain silent about the nature of the emergency, or to normalize Trump and the Republican-fascist movement as a slightly exaggerated version of "politics as usual."

Those who did speak out were frequently dismissed and mocked as alarmists by the mainstream media, while also being personally targeted for harassment, abuse and political revenge by Trump and his acolytes. That has been especially true of former Republicans and conservatives who spoke out against Trump, and were then branded as traitors and heretics by his followers and the right-wing rage machine.

Cheri Jacobus can claim to be one of the first Republican "Never Trumpers." A former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee, she has years of experience as a conservative political strategist, communications expert and commentator. Jacobus is founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR, and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, PBS and ABC and other outlets. Her opinion essays have been featured in USA Today, the Guardian, the Hill, the Daily Beast, the Daily News and elsewhere.

In 2016, Jacobus unsuccessfully sued Donald Trump for defamation, claiming that his public attacks on her had resulted in millions of dollars in losses to her professional reputation and other harm. In this conversation, she discusses how the American news media and the rest of the country's political class normalized Trump and boosted his candidacy, in search of ratings, money, access and power. She also explains why so many leading Republicans and right-wing elites ultimately supported Trump even when they knew that he and his followers represented an extreme danger to the country.

Jacobus reflects on questions of accountability and penance for conservatives who betrayed their supposed principles and enabled Trumpism, and argues that many of the Republicans who have testified before the Jan. 6 committee — and are now being celebrated as patriotic heroes — are actually self-interested actors who should not be trusted. At the end of this conversation, Jacobus cautions that the Republican Party cannot be redeemed or rehabilitated and that Democrats and the public must act accordingly if American democracy is to survive.

Given all that is happening from the Jan. 6 hearings, the escalating assault on democracy by Trump and his allies, and what feels like a never-ending torrent of other troubles, how are you feeling? How do you make sense of it all?

I've been in this fight for seven years. I'm an original "Never Trumper." Donald Trump came after me and got me kicked off Fox News in October of 2015, because I publicly confirmed a Washington Post report that he had a super PAC. Ever since then, I became a target. Of course this was mainly Fox News, but also CNN. There are a lot of guilty parties.

This was very distressing to me, as someone who's been a part of the American news media for many decades. You know, I have a healthy cynicism about politics and political media. You know they're in it for the ratings. You know people aren't going to be perfect. But you still expect some basic level of decency and ethics. I was shaken to my core real early on with how the news media normalized and amplified Donald Trump.

All these years later, to see it's still going on — that is immensely disappointing. Donald Trump and these right-wing extremist Republicans and the bad guys more generally are winning, and have already won bigger than I ever could have feared.

What are your feelings about the House Jan. 6 hearings?

The hearings have been blockbusters. They exposed the breadth and depth of the effort to overturn an election, overtake our government by force and impose a type of government never seen or experienced in America. It should not have taken a year and half for us to get this information. We came close to losing our democracy and we are still in peril. But the hearing witnesses were credible, had a wealth of valuable information and were almost exclusively Republicans, so it's impossible to blame it all on the Democrats.

What about the Republicans who testified and the media narrative that presents them as heroes? I see few if any heroes there. They were coerced, or otherwise testified out of self-interest — including Cassidy Hutchinson. They have almost to a person said they were proud of having worked with the Trump regime and would vote for him and other Republicans in the future.

The witnesses are not heroes. They were under oath and had no choice. If they were heroes, they would have come forward 12 to 18 months ago. Cassidy Hutchinson even tried to go work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago after Jan. 6. If the coup had succeeded and Trump had forced his way back into office, these people would all still be with him. They were saving themselves with their testimony.

Do you still believe that Trump and his confederates will never be properly punished for their obvious crimes? We have this narrative that "the walls are closing in" everywhere. I remain very suspicious of that, and will not be satisfied until Trump is in prison for a long time.

Merrick Garland allowed Trump to keep those documents at Mar-a-Lago for a year and a half. He did not initiate the FBI raid — he merely gave his OK. He has harmed our democracy by not acting on the Jan. 6-related Trump crimes, the obstruction outlined in the Mueller report and other Trump crimes. I do believe that public pressure and the excellent work of the Jan. 6 committee is effectively pushing him into action, even though it's tardy. As well, Trump forced his hand by ignoring a subpoena to return the stolen documents, and now we know they were highly sensitive documents about nuclear weapons. It's almost as if Trump wanted this drama and showdown.

How do you explain the level of denial from people in the mainstream media, the political class and other professional smart people about Trump and his fascist movement? They are stuck on this hamster wheel of supposed shock and surprise. To me, it's sickening to watch.

Everybody in the American political establishment and those circles in Washington knew what Trump was. That includes the Republicans and the media. They just didn't think he was going to win. They thought they were going to have their fun. I left the Republican Party the day after they nominated Trump. People kept asking me, "Why are you doing that? He's going to lose. We're all going to pull back together."

I didn't want to sit at that table. I couldn't imagine being in strategy meetings with people who had ever been fine or accepting of Trump. When he won, I was already well along in my decision to leave the Republican Party. I didn't need to wait to be convinced. I already knew how bad it was.

I try to call out corruption on both sides of the aisle. There are Never Trumpers who I believe are frauds. Maybe they started out doing the right thing but along the way turned it into a grift. I welcome everybody. That includes people who worked for Trump and changed their minds. Or maybe they just, for the sake of history, wanted to end up on the right side.

I also don't trust the people who have always been very successful in politics and media, and who flip-flopped back and forth and claimed that they didn't know how bad Trump really was. They knew how bad he was. They were just trying to get something out of Trump. When it didn't work out, they backed off.

The professional centrist types and the Beltway careerists are some of the worst offenders in terms of being in perpetual denial about Trumpism and what that man and his movement did to the country. They truly believe that a return to "normal" is possible.

They're not in denial. They all know, and have always known, what Trump is. They put their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. You would not believe all the messages I have from people who work professionally in politics and media who never thought he could win and who opposed him. But then those same people turned around and got in line. They wanted to keep their TV contracts and their lobbying gigs. They wanted to keep their place as a cog in the wheel. Where else were they going to go? They saw what happened to me. The professional politics and media types don't want to take the risk of being retaliated against and punished.

What do you say to those in the media and political classes, or among the public, who argue that the best way to defeat Trump and his fascist movement is to ignore him — that taking away the attention will weaken him?

You can't ignore Donald Trump. He is too dangerous. One of the main problems now is that Trump has successfully said to his followers, "Only pay attention to Fox or Breitbart or Newsmax. Everybody else is fake news. They're all lying to you." Once you put those tens of millions of people in an information vacuum with their blinders on, we are in very dangerous territory as a society.

The Trumpists and Republicans and others who follow him don't care about democracy and a good society. It is tribalism. All they care about is their side winning. They like the white supremacy. They like the misogyny. They like the fighting and chaos. They like the idea of beating up on people they view as being below them or too different from them.

His followers also like the feeling of belonging, the feeling that they are part of something bigger than themselves. It makes them feel smart and strong. In their minds, being MAGA and in TrumpWorld gives them a sense of importance and an identity they may have never felt before in their entire lives.

There are other people, however, who, if they had accurate information about reality, the news and politics more generally, might change their minds about Trump. Those people are in information silos. The Republicans and other members of the right know that once you put people in these information silos, blocking them off from accurate information, you control them. You control what they know. They think they're informed because they spend a lot of time in these spaces consuming information. Some of these persuadable voters can be pulled away from the Republican Party and Trump. Close elections are won or lost on these margins.

As someone who was a Republican insider, how do you explain this version of the Republican Party? How did it come into existence?

When I first started out in politics, I was working for Bob Michel. He was House Republican leader at the time. There was this weird right-wing fringe element here and there in the party and conservative movement, but they were nowhere near as prevalent as they would become years later.

When the Republicans took over Congress in the mid '90s, these fringe elements got more power. They were

part of a coalition, and they were going to get something as part of that bargain with the Republican leadership. That fringe became stronger until it was able to bully and drown out the more reasonable voices in the Republican Party and conservative movement. The extremists are not interested in compromise with the Democrats to advance legislation that would be in everyone's interest. They just want to win at any cost.

Did Trump transform the Republican Party, or did he just give them permission to be their true selves?

Trump boiled the frog slowly. There are Republicans who say and believe things and tolerate behavior now because of Trump that they would not have 10 years ago. More generally, Trump and his allies were able to move Republican voters to become more extreme. What they did is really a type of brainwashing, for lack of a better word.

The news media is also to blame for this discord and extremism. When I started out in politics, 80% of Americans were more or less in the center or slightly to the left or right of it. But the news media got to a point where they only wanted to highlight the conflict between the extremes on either side. They want drama. They want fights.

I used to be on TV all the time. But what happened is that Fox would want me to come on only if I stuck to certain talking points and had a far right-wing perspective on a given topic. Fox usually wanted catfights. They actually used that language. Fox wanted that drama. And if I was not sufficiently right-wing or if I wasn't going to say the thing that would cause fireworks and draw eyeballs and create drama and controversy, they weren't interested.

A reasonable moderate that actually knows her stuff, especially if she's a woman, was not something Fox wanted. So they started dumbing down the entire political debate. The cable networks more generally do that now. The result is that the public is done a disservice and are not in a position to really learn what is going on in politics and the world from the 24/7 news cycle.

What about your Republican colleagues who made the bargain with Trumpism? What was their calculus? Was it just power and money? Was it ideology? Something else? You know many of these people personally.

Some of them reasoned that Trump was going to be nominated, so let's back him. Others didn't jump on board with Trump until he won. Others backed Trump because they wanted to fit in and still be able to go to their monthly Republican Women's Club meeting. Those higher up in the food chain wanted to keep their lobbying and TV jobs.

What does Donald Trump represent to you?

He's absolutely a corrupt crook. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that he is owned by Russia and Putin. Trump is an unbelievably evil human being. I believe that he is one of the most evil people that we've ever seen in American public life. He brings out the worst in people. Once Trump is emboldened a little bit, he doesn't stop, he keeps going. The biggest mistake Democrats made was not impeaching Trump for obstruction of justice as proven in the Mueller report.

Once he knew they were going to back down, he felt he could do whatever he wanted, and he has. The world is paying a price. And then to see all the people who follow him and deny what he is, or think it doesn't matter. It's disheartening. And I do not believe that the United States is going to recover from Donald Trump and what he did in my lifetime.

We defeated him. Democrats were given the majority. One of the main reasons the Democrats were put in power is because the American people wanted accountability and justice. We don't have it yet. If Donald Trump is not punished for his crimes, then this country is done for.

It should be easy to attack and defeat Trump and the Republicans, based on the literal harm and death their policies have caused and continue to cause. Their actual policies are unpopular across the board. Yet the Republicans have, for the most part, gained the momentum. What advice would you give the Democrats about messaging and strategy?

Everything has to be about the Jan. 6 hearings — getting that information out to the American people and keeping it front and center. This has to be done on the local level and through other means, not just through national news media.

Communicate clearly to the American people and those Fox viewers and Republicans and others who back Trump that are persuadable. Tell them that what Trump did on Jan. 6 is treason. Don't be hyperbolic. Focus on the facts and information. Convince those people who can be convinced. Don't fight with people who you're never going to convince. Tell these Republican persuadables, "This is no longer the party that you were once a part of."

Don't shame people because they've been Republicans for 40 years. Convince them that the party they're with now is not what they think it is, it's not what they remember. I guarantee you that many of these people are in that information silo and do not understand how much the Republican Party has changed for the worse.

In addition, some of the best spokespeople in the Democrat Party are not visible enough. For example, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. Those are the people who should be on the news all the time on Sundays, and even on the opinion shows. Republicans are using every tool in their toolbox and then some. Democrats are not — and they're the majority party in Congress.

What about accountability for the Republicans who helped to build this monster? There's a whole class of consultants, advisers, elected officials, media commentators and activists who helped to birth American neofascism. They should not be allowed to wash their hands of it all just by announcing they no longer support Donald Trump.

There are different levels here. Everybody didn't help to build this monster in the same way. Yes, there are political consultants and/or advertising experts who did such a thing. There are sincere Never Trumpers like me who can help the Democrats. There are some things I regret — but to want me to do penance because I was a Republican? You are not going to win over these persuadable Republican voters and win elections if the approach is to make them feel guilty.

That kind of message is not going to work for people who are still Republicans but could be won over if they had different sources of news and other information outside the right-wing echo chamber. In the end, there were some people who were more responsible for getting us to this point with Trump and this democracy crisis. One of my errors was actually believing that the Republican Party was a "big tent." Now I realize that was absolutely not true. Hindsight is 20/20. When should I have known that the Republican Party wasn't really a big tent? I am still grappling with that.

So many centrist types and others, especially in the media class, have this standard line where they say that Republican elected officials and party elites, the news media personalities, the strategists and the like don't actually believe what they are saying. In other words, these talking points about "critical race theory" or "grooming" or the "great replacement" are so ridiculous they don't really believe it. My response is: Who cares? They are saying those things because it works to win elections and gain power. And the people who make excuses for them are just protecting their peer group.

It doesn't matter if the Republican elites believe what they are saying, because they are getting their public to believe it. I don't care what Tucker Carlson believes. I care that Tucker Carlson has a huge platform, and he's saying things that are getting people killed. I don't care if he believes it or not. He's doing it. Is the problem with Rupert Murdoch, for giving him a platform?

It doesn't matter if they believe it. They're doing it. They have no conscience. They're doing it because they know how to fool the rubes. They know how to get people to be OK with it. And I hate to say it, but: American voters — are they stupid? Some of them are, yes. We've seen the stupid people at the Trump rallies. There are others who think they're informed because they've been told not to watch other media except Fox. They've been told that everybody else is lying to them. They think if they get the newsletters from Judicial Watch or Heritage Foundation, and they watch Fox and go to political gatherings that they are being informed. Again, they are not.

Can this Republican Party be rehabilitated or otherwise saved after Donald Trump?

I left the party the day after they nominated Trump. I'd been an RNC spokesperson. I've worked on Capitol Hill. For years, I had been a lobbyist. I was a TV pundit. All of it. I left the party, because I knew that it was over. Is the Republican Party salvageable? No. I didn't think it was salvageable even if Trump had lost in 2016.

My fear is that the Democrats are still pretending that the Republican Party can be saved. They are pretending this is true because they are afraid to directly take on the Republican Party and the horrible things it now represents and has done. The Democrats in Congress are afraid that if they push for indictments for the Republicans who aided and abetted Trump and his coup, there will be retaliation when and if the Republicans take back control of the House and Senate. That's the driving force now behind a lot of the reticence on the part of Democrats: fear.

In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd describes Donald Trump as an "American monster." This is an entirely reasonable view, but American society is mired in such a state of malignant normality that this monster has tens of millions of followers, who worship his greed, criminality and cruelty.

Dowd contrasts Trump to the monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," who begins with "elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe's 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' and gathering firewood for a poor family." But then his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons and rejects him, refusing to make him a mate:

The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes, and black lips. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.
'Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,' he laments. 'I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.'
Before he disappears into the Arctic at the end of the book, he muses that once he had 'high thoughts of honour,' until his 'frightful catalogue' of malignant deeds piled up.
Shelley's monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster's malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.

Dowd surmises that it never occurred to Donald Trump that a president openly plotting a seditious coup "would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title." The House Jan. 6 committee's first prime-time hearing, she writes, played out as "a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated":

In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end 'American carnage. 'Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.

But who created this American monster? Donald Trump was not built by a deranged scientist in a secret lab. He is not an orphan, and did not emerge out of nowhere. He was the almost inevitable result of a decades-long assault by the "conservative" movement aimed at ending American democracy (especially multiracial democracy) and replacing it with a pseudo-democratic authoritarian state, perhaps organized under the system political theorist Sheldon Wolin described as "inverted totalitarianism."

As part of that long-term assault, most or all the historic victories of the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor and environmental movements and other struggles for human dignity and a more just society are being rolled back. If this project succeeds, America's already threadbare social safety net will be virtually eliminated. White Christian fascists and corporate plutocrats will forge a ruling coalition with near-total dominion over American life and society. The separation of church and state, along with the guarantee of free speech and most of the Bill of Rights, will disappear.

There is no longer a "normal" or "traditional" version of the Republican Party for so-called conservatives to return to. Even those conservatives who have disavowed or denounced the Trump movement are implicated in his rise. They are like political Dr. Frankensteins, horrified by what they have created but unable to kill it. Over the course of decades, they painstakingly built the monster and created the blueprint for American fascism.

As Wajahat Ali wrote this week in the Daily Beast, some of Trump's "most prominent enablers" are now trying to distance themselves from the "ongoing, concentrated, right-wing effort to overturn the 2020 election":

Even though most of these ex-Trumpers will fail up in their careers—as is often the case in Washington, D.C. — it's important for the rest of us to recognize them as utterly complicit actors who deserve to wear that MAGA hat on their heads until the end of time….
If you believe that there is a 'team normal' in the modern GOP, then you'll also probably believe that fewer doors and arming teachers will reduce mass gun shootings, banning books will save your child from being transgender, and climate change is a hoax created by China.
Either way, you're not acknowledging that the GOP is now a weaponized cult that no longer produces 'rational' Republicans, but instead caters to the festering, fevered paranoid swamp of dangerous conspiracy theories and white supremacist ideologies. This persistent right-wing disinformation has now radicalized its base, in which many members believe violence is necessary to 'take back' their country. The reality is that Team Normal and Team Crazy both play for the GOP, wear the same uniforms, and, for now, worship the golden calf known as Trump.

Ultimately, Donald Trump is not some type of monstrous Other or outsider. He was not conjured up in some other dimension ruled by Lovecraftian demons, only to descend on America out of the ether to sow destruction, chaos, misery and death.

In reality, Donald Trump — as a man, a symbol and a political leader — and everything he embodies is the product of our society, driven by extreme social inequality, consumerism and greed, unfulfilled dreams, widespread alienation and loneliness, anti-intellectualism, racism and white supremacy, the cult of the spectacle, our fetish for violence and a range of related antisocial and anti-human values and tendencies.

In a recent essay for ScheerPost republished at Salon, Chris Hedges offers a powerful diagnosis of our corrupt and failing American political system, arguing that the House Jan. 6 committee will do nothing to correct it:

The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lockstep for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women who support Donald Trump and the far right.

There are other systemic failures as well. America's mainstream news media, through both habit and laziness, have approached Donald Trump, and American politics more generally, as a running narrative of "great men" (and, more recently, "great women"), singular figures who are the main characters in an unfolding drama largely independent of history, culture or economic reality.

This partly explains the media's obsession with polling and public opinion, the addiction to horserace coverage and the drive to identify "winners" and "losers" on a daily basis. Of course the mainstream media is also driven by profit, and compelled to shape the news so as not to offend advertisers or alienate the political establishment and other social and cultural elites.

Media practitioners are also trained to avoid moral language when describing domestic politics, although they routinely use such language when discussing foreign affairs, and especially Americans' official enemies. The result is that most mainstream American political journalism remains an exercise in stenography and superficial commentary, almost always bending the knee to such totems as "moderation," "normal politics," "fairness" and "balance," concepts that were likely never helpful or transparent and are now totally inadequate to the task of confronting America's democracy crisis.

Many in the media still refuse to see the Trump movement and the modern Republican Party as destructive revolutionary forces, rather than as traditional political movements with an investment in the existing system. At this point, the media's willful or compulsive refusal to comprehend the nature of the threat has become a pathology. Journalists at mainstream outlets would benefit greatly from reading "The Authoritarian Playbook: A Media Guide," a new report from the nonpartisan nonprofit group Protect Democracy. It offers the following advice:

To the extent that the authoritarian playbook has a central theme, it is that democratic erosion is a process of power concentration and consolidation. While all political actors seek to accumulate power, authoritarians, uniquely, seek to entrench that power and protect it from external checks. Experts generally agree that democracies don't tend to die at the hands of individuals alone. Rather, contemporary attacks on democracy only succeed when they are coordinated, systemic, and undertaken by broad parties or movements.

If Donald Trump the American monster is somehow banished from American political life — through criminal prosecution, advancing age or some other force — another such monster will rapidly appear. In fact, Ron DeSantis and other leading Republican-fascists are eagerly waiting for Trump to leave the stage, and could well turn out to be more competent and more effective than him. Trumpism is a hydra-headed movement, no longer dependent on Trump as an individual: Chop off one of its heads and another will grow. The only long-term solution is to drain the swamp that birthed the monster.

It has been almost a year and a half since Jan. 6, 2021, when Donald Trump and his cabal attempted to nullify the results of the presidential election, and by doing so effectively bring an end American democracy. By any reasonable standard, this was the greatest crime committed by an American president in the country's history.

Last Thursday night, the House committee tasked with investigating Jan. 6 and the larger threat to American democracy held the first in a series of televised hearings. Its preliminary findings are that Trump and numerous allies, including Republican members of Congress, orchestrated a sophisticated, well-funded, nationwide effort that included the Big Lie and other propaganda about "election fraud," dozens of spurious legal challenges designed to subvert the electoral outcome and undermine public faith in democracy, and other attempts to rig the outcome in Trump's favor.

The coup plot also involved premeditated political violence and terrorism as seen in the attack on the Capitol by right-wing paramilitaries and thousands of other Trump followers. Trump's coup plot also involved proposals to invoke martial law and use the military and other security forces to "confiscate" voting machines and presumably engage in other nefarious tasks as ordered.

The ultimate goal of this elaborate plot was for Trump to remain in power indefinitely as an political strongman who rules by declaring a perpetual "national emergency" or finding some other quasi-legal justification to end democratic government.

Trump and his cabal's plan came much closer to succeeding than most people recognized at the time. In that sense, the events of Jan. 6 were practice for a future coup attempt — one far more likely to succeed, given that America's pro-democracy forces are being defeated at almost every turn.

There are many people who would prefer to erase this fact from memory and history: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, with the goal of putting Donald Trump in power and thereby undermining and destabilizing American democracy. As confirmed again by the House Jan. 6 committee's presentation, Putin's plan was remarkably successful.

In fact, none of this is a revelation; with the exception of a few new details, all this information has been public knowledge for some time. The real power of the House committee's first hearing lay in efficiently connecting the dots, navigating a mountain of evidence, and ultimately framing a devastating case that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators should be prosecuted and convicted on numerous criminal charges.

In just over two hours, the committee provided new information that confirmed some of the rumors and rumblings around Trump's coup plot and the events of Jan. 6. Some of Trump's Cabinet members, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power following the attack on the Capitol. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly refused to consider this despite ample justifications given Trump's erratic and dangerous behavior.

Trump was reportedly elated that his followers wanted to kill Mike Pence for refusing to cooperate with the coup plot. But Trump cannot plausibly claim that he didn't know he had lost the election: He was repeatedly told by political advisers and legal experts, including Attorney General Bill Barr, that Joe Biden had won the election and that voter fraud had not played a role.

At least one Republican member of Congress sought a pardon from Trump for his role in the coup plot, a de facto admission of criminal culpability. As for the violence on Jan. 6, to a significant degree it was premeditated and planned well before Jan. 6 and Trump's speech urging his followers to march on the Capitol. Members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have now been indicted by the Justice Department on charges of seditious conspiracy.

In total, as outlined by the House select committee during their first public hearing on Thursday, the unifying theme so far is that Donald Trump is a criminal mastermind, with a remarkable ability to corrupt the people around him by ensnaring them in a web of antisocial and pathological values and behavior. Donald Trump is a political cult leader, an apparent sociopath and an incipient fascist strongman who commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans.

To discuss the current state of the Trump cult I recently spoke with Steven Hassan, one of the world's leading experts on cults and other dangerous organizations, as well as how to deprogram people who have succumbed to "mind control." Hassan was once a senior member of the Unification Church, better known as the "Moonies." He is now founder and director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center and has written several bestselling books, including "Freedom of Mind," "Combating Cult Mind Control" and, most recently, "The Cult of Trump."

In this conversation, Hassan discusses Trump's enduring power over his followers and why it has outlasted his presidency. He argues that right-wing Christian churches, Fox News, conspiracy theorists, right-wing social media and other propaganda machines are keeping Trump's cultists loyal and further radicalizing them. He warns that the cult is actually bigger than Donald Trump and may outlast him, because "today's Republican Party is part of an authoritarian cult movement that hates democracy and freedom."

Hassan also reflects on his own experience as a cult member who was conditioned to be willing to kill on command. He warns that Trump's most loyal followers would likely obey such orders targeting Democrats, liberals, progressives, Muslims, black and brown people, or other designated enemies.

Donald Trump is a political cult leader, but he is no longer president. How does that influence his power over the cult members? What happens next?

My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump's coup attempt.

I agreed to write "The Cult of Trump" with the knowledge that Trump was a malignant narcissist. He fits the stereotypical profile of a cult leader. I viewed him as the leader of a cult of personality. His business is also part of his cult. As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs.

What is the role of the Big Lie in Trump's cult and the larger movement?

The Big Lie operates on the assumption that the more extreme the lie, the average person cannot even imagine making up such a lie. The average person then rationalizes the Big Lie as being true because the opposite somehow cannot be true. The Big Lie is ultimately bigger than most people's ability to contemplate it. It is just too much of a lie to not be true. What solidifies it is constant repetition, and it also works because the leader projects the Big Lie onto some type of enemy. Mind control cults always need an enemy — a devil to focus people's anger and negative emotions on.

What is the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump's cult? So many journalists and other professional politics-watchers still do not understand that Trumpism is much bigger than one man, or that it's a mistake to say that the Republican Party was "taken over" by Trump and his cult.

Today's Republican Party is part of an authoritarian cult movement that hates democracy and freedom. They want blind obedience. They want people to distrust science and reason and critical thinking. Another example of how cults work is the belief that a person can create their own reality, where if a person truly believes something then it must be true. Of course that is ridiculous.

That is why it is important for the Department of Justice to prosecute Donald Trump and the other top Republicans who were involved in the coup attempt. A message needs to be sent to the cult members that reality exists and that there are consequences for criminal behavior. Right now, these Trump Republican cult members believe that manmade laws do not apply to them, because they exist on some higher plane or alternate reality.

The Trumpists and other fascists are now burning books they deem to be "dangerous" or "un-American," and targeting books by Black and brown authors or by and about the LGBTQ community. What is the role of book-burning and book-banning, in terms of cults and mind control?

Book burnings are an example of information control. That is a key part of the authoritarian cult. Book burnings are part of an escalating pattern that ends with arresting and killing journalists and other truth-tellers.

Republicans and other right-wing authoritarians have wanted to destroy public education for decades. Why? Because an educated citizen is what a democracy needs. To have a theocracy, for example, or some other type of authoritarian regime, you need uneducated citizens, especially young people. That is one of the main reasons why the right wing pushes for homeschooling and charter schools. The dumbing down of Americans is a hugely important part of their anti-democracy project.

Donald Trump has suggested that his followers must be ready to kill and die for his cause. He praises the Jan. 6 terrorists as patriots, victims and political prisoners. Michael Flynn has told people at his events that they should be prepared to "charge machine-gun nests" to defend their children against "critical race theory." How does this fit into the relationship between the cult leader and his followers?

I was taught such things when I was in the Moonies. I was told to be prepared, if North Korea invaded South Korea, to go to the front lines and die. I was later trained to die or kill on command without hesitation. Michael Flynn is an expert on military intelligence. He knows exactly what he is going to do. Flynn is creating an army of people to engage in a civil war.

Who do you think is likely to follow such orders?

We need to start with the military vets who feel betrayed by the U.S. government. Some of them may also have emotional or psychological issues as well. There are many veterans in the cult of Trump, and they're trained killers. If you make moral appeals and claim that you are acting in the name of God and country, then it is easy to get people to sacrifice their comfort and even their money, their marriage and their families for the cause. Once you make it into a matter of good and evil, and then psychologically condition a person that the other side are not really human, it is easy to get people to engage in lethal violence.

How do you explain Trump's enduring power over his followers, and over Republican voters as a whole?

The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.

If the pastor says, "God wants Trump," you're going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, "God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God's taken the blessing away from Donald Trump," then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they're already in a mind-control cult.

How have Trump, the Republican Party and other right-wing leaders been able to successfully create an alternate reality for their followers?

It started with an increasingly extreme Republican Party and right-wing movement. They have their own media, churches and so forth. The members are just voting for the party now, without doing much critical thinking. It was incremental at first, but now the Trumpists are the hardcore base of the authoritarian political movement. These diehard Republicans and other conservatives are in Christian religious cults, or they've been sucked into QAnon and other apocalyptic, "end of days," great-reset conspiracy theories. It is all related.

Outsiders often say that Trump is dumb or stupid and make fun of his rallies. They say his speeches are incoherent. When I listen to Trump and observe his rallies, I see a dangerous and sophisticated propaganda machine and brainwashing operation. The use of repetition and the manipulation of emotions and violent imagery is highly intentional.

If they are already indoctrinated, these rallies and other repeated messaging are just more confirmation, reinforcement and community-building. It makes these Trump cultists feel like they are not alone, that they are part of a big powerful movement. Fox News is an integral part of this as well. When Fox News keeps claiming that it is the most powerful cable news network, that makes the viewers feel like they are part of a powerful community and movement. It is very strategic.

Many experts on national security, terrorism and related topics are warning that the United States is on the verge of a second civil war or a sustained right-wing insurgency, and that Jan. 6 was just the beginning. What is your estimate of the likelihood of Trump's cult members engaging in widespread violence?

Ninety-five percent. I am certain there will be a civil war or other type of massive violence. I say this as a former cult leader who wanted to take over America and thought that democracy was Satanic, and that we must take over the world for God. Part of that mission was getting rid of Satan's army. The likelihood of a second civil war in America, because of Trumpism and these other authoritarian cults, is very high.

Will the average Trump supporter participate in this violence?

I'm going to apply the rule of thirds: One-third will double down and engage in acts of violence. Another third will not follow the commands. The middle third will make their decision based on what their peers are doing. I wish the news media would understand the danger we're in. The people who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God are going to be the ones committing most of these violent acts.

Like other forms of fascism, authoritarianism and reactionary politics, Donald Trump's so-called movement is a symptom of deeper problems in society, not the cause. Trumpism is not a boil that can be lanced, thereby ending the infection. It's more like a tumor growing from the bones.

It's not exactly true that the Republican Party was conquered or "taken over" by the Trump movement, as many observers still perceive it. The seeds of Trumpism were planted in Republican soil decades ago, and found it a hospitable environment. It's more accurate to perceive Trumpism as the next evolutionary (or, more properly, devolutionary) stage of the Republican Party and the overall conservative movement. It's where right-wing politics were going in America, whether leading conservatives understood that or not.

In this conversation, Eisen describes the power of "Trumpery," as he calls it — a combination of disdain for ethical restrictions, assault on the rule of law, incessant falsehood and disinformation, the shameless pursuit of personal and political interest, not the public interest, the exploitation and exacerbation of political division, and attacks on democracy itself. He also discusses why the Republican Party so enthusiastically mated with Trumpism in its quest for autocratic and near-dictatorial power and control over American government and society.

Eisen also discusses why so many members of America's mainstream news media remain in denial about the danger posed by Trump and his Republican-fascist movement and remain locked into to obsolete patterns of "both-sides-ism," "balance" and "neutrality" that are entirely inadequate to the country's worsening democracy crisis.

Toward the end of this conversation, Eisen counsels patience with Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department, suggesting and that the upcoming House committee hearings on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, will be crucial in holding Donald Trump and his cabal accountable for their obvious or likely crimes against democracy.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling now, given America's democracy crisis and all the other challenges we face as a country and people?

Everybody has their own way of medicating their anxieties about our country's democracy. One of my forms of self-medication is to write books. "Overcoming Trumpery" is my fourth book, and this one was really born out of the alarm that I felt when I realized that Donald Trump may be out of the White House, but Trumpery was still with us. Moreover, Trumpery might even be more dangerous now than when Trump was in office. Trumpery is running amok in the GOP. It has really conquered one of our major political parties.

Why is it so challenging for many people to accept — especially the mainstream news media and other Beltway types — that the problem is much bigger than Donald Trump? That the real problem is not just Trump personally, but what he represents and what he has unleashed?

Yes, the problem is not the man himself, but rather the ideology and the approach to governance that he represents. Trumpery is an American-flavored form of the autocracy that we see from Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. That's all it is. The ideology is more dangerous than the man himself. The idea we are discussing is a hard sell for many, even though it is self-evident.

One of the traits of Trumpery is the attack on democracy. The press, to their credit, said, "These phony electors who were sent to Congress are not real." They called them They didn't treat Trump and John Eastman's cockamamie ideas about Congress throwing out Electoral College votes as being genuine. They said these are baseless ideas. The press also did not say that there was any substantial question as to whether Trump won the election or Biden did. They said that Trump lost and that he is lying about it. That is true objectivity. They did not hide behind some notion of "press neutrality." But now that Trump is no longer president they have fallen back to that habit.

Has there been some decision made in the media, like a kind of editorial consensus not to highlight the danger? What is going on here with the media's framing and agenda-setting?

I give the press credit. In a pre-Trump America, there were norms that applied in our government and politics. Trump transgressed those norms. The problem is, when you have a norm- and law-defying person like Trump you cannot continue to apply the old norms of journalism, such as neutrality.

That norm deems that if you're going to provide one side of the story then you have to provide the other side of the story. If something happens, you need to report it neutrally. Editorializing is for the editorial page. The inferences, the interpretation, that doesn't go in the news. But if you have a norm-transgressing figure like Donald Trump, then those journalistic norms have to adapt to that circumstance. We can't be static. That is why journalism in this country is stuck.

And thinking about the law, that is why the prosecutors are stuck. Why on earth has nobody prosecuted Trump? Because we have a norm that there is a very steep burden to prosecute an ex-president. We don't want to be like those countries where the winner prosecutes the loser in an election.

I do think that both are going to come unstuck, certainly on the prosecutors' side. The best way to overcome Trumpery is through prosecution. It sends a message to everyone that there are consequences for this kind of norm- and law-busting behavior that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators engaged in.

Why isn't Donald Trump in prison? Why haven't Trump's inner circle and the other coup plotters been prosecuted?

The Jan. 6 hearings in the House are going to be very important. The DOJ typically starts at the bottom and works their way up the food chain. They've done that with the hundreds of insurrectionists that they've charged. We know they're asking them about the involvement of the White House and other members of the inner circle. There are other signs that are pointing, at the very least, to a DOJ investigation.

Is Merrick Garland afraid to prosecute Trump and other members of his inner circle because of "norms" and "precedent" about holding a former president accountable? What do you think the legal and political calculus is?

Garland fears no person. I've known him for years and he is a great American jurist and lawyer. He has said that he's going to follow the evidence where it leads and apply the law without fear or favor. He's going to let the chips fall where they may. I believe him. He's very methodical. He's very deliberate.

There's some element of not bumping into the Jan. 6 committee's work. There are strong norms at work here: You don't stampede into prosecuting a president.

Garland also needed to restore another kind of norm — and that was the norm of a properly functioning Department of Justice. He's only a year and a half into his tenure, if even that long. He needed to get things settled down in the DOJ before he made such a momentous move. I have a lot of confidence in Merrick Garland's decision-making.

They are running out of time. What about the Jan. 6 committee's decision not to televise its work? I am of the opinion that most if not all of the hearings should have been on television to keep this in the public's consciousness for all these months.

They were gathering the evidence. The hearings are going to take place in June. Based on the evidence we've seen so far, those hearings are going to be very dynamic. Undoubtedly, even with all the leaks, we've just seen the tip of the iceberg. I believe they have time to do their Watergate-style hearings. A month is a lot more time now than it was in the 1970s. You can get a lot more done in a month now. People get bombarded with more information on their iPhones and via social media in an hour than you used to get in an entire day. The committee has ample time left. They wanted to be thorough and now we're going to see the results. I think they're going to be strong.

As you were watching the events unfold on Jan. 6, what were you thinking?

I was in a TV studio just a few blocks from the insurrection. I watched the video feed on multiple screens as the insurrection unfolded. As a student of the American political process, I felt horror at the fact that for first time since 1860 we had a disruption of the peaceful transfer of power in this country.

I felt that the warnings that I and others had made about the dangers of Trumpery had come to pass. I was sad to be proven right. I had said that this could lead to violence and that Donald Trump was playing with fire. I was not surprised that he was silent for 187 minutes. I feel quite certain that Trump was rooting for the insurrectionists, and we now have evidence to that point. I felt a mix of emotions. I was uncertain about the future.

When Republicans initially spoke out about Jan. 6, I was encouraged that this would be the end of Trumpery and the ongoing risk to our country. But that turned out to be wrong. Trump reasserted his grip and power. Above all, I would say that the insurrection is continuing. The Republicans, motivated by the Big Lie and the attempted coup, have now just moved it into the states.

What the Republicans attempted to do in the aftermath of the 2020 election was to attack the rules and the referees, meaning the election officials, as a way of attacking the results. They failed, but they're still doing it. There are hundreds of bills to attack the rules so that they can change the results next time. The Republicans are doing this from coast to coast. The attempted coup has not ended.

What is so compelling about "Trumpery" for the Republicans? For Trump's followers?

They want power at all costs. We need to deal with that. We cannot allow this slow rolling preparation for another coup to go unchecked. The coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents that defeated Trump and the Republicans in 2020 need to step up and do the same thing in 2022.

What is "democracy"? What is the "rule of law"? These concepts are summoned all of the time in conversations about the Age of Trump and this crisis, but they are rarely defined or explained. These definitions are critical.

The legitimacy of our constitutional republic is founded in the choices of the American people. In the United States, it's sometimes said that "the voters choose their leaders." In an autocracy, the leaders make that choice. That is the core difference between American democracy and the kind of American autocracy that Donald Trump is pushing.

Trump's behavior was anti-democratic because he wanted to substitute his own decision to stay in power for the choice that the voters made. The moral legitimacy of our democracy and government stems from the choice of the people. It's really as simple as that. Trump wanted to substitute his own choice for that of the American people and the Constitution.

As for the rule of law, there is a system of rules that we've agreed on, and the rules apply equally to all. Again, no person is above the law. Trump wanted to put himself above those rules. The rules should be the same for everyone. He wanted a special new set of rules for himself. So, that's what the rule of law means. Trump transgressed it thousands of times, but the last one, on Jan. 6, 2021, was the worst.

Did Trumpery impose itself on the Republican Party, or was the party already afflicted with the sickness before Donald Trump? In essence, those values and beliefs were already there.

The seeds were certainly there for a very long time. When Sen. Mitch McConnell was asked at the beginning of the Obama administration, in which I served, "What's your objective?" he said, "To deny Barack Obama a second term." That's a form of Trumpery. He's putting his narrow partisan political interests above the interests of the country.

Every single one of the deadly sins of Trumpery was germinating in the Republican Party before Donald Trump. For example, the disdain for ethics, attacking the rule of law, lies and disinformation. The sheer shamelessness. Pursuing personal political interest and not the public interest. Driving divisions and attacking democracy. The nativism, the populism, the attacks on minorities. We've seen so much of this with the Republicans even before Trump. We've seen so much that's wrong, but it was a minority position that was germinating. It took Trump to really lead Trumpery to dominance in the Republican Party. The Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Mar-a-Lago. That's a disaster with one of our two major parties.

What can we do to purge or inoculate America's democratic culture from Trumpery?

We have to empower the people who are pro-democracy to get out there and fight for our democracy, as we did in 2020. The tools are there. We need to have the will. We need to join together. We need to set party aside; democracy should not be a partisan issue. It worked in 2020. I think it can work again in 2022 and beyond.

The Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement are in revolutionary mode, aiming to push American society back before the civil rights era, and perhaps into the 19th century. They seek to reverse the struggle to expand democracy and full citizenship — however unevenly or incompletely — to include Black and brown people, women, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized and oppressed groups.

This is part of a much larger strategy by Republicans and their allies to end America's multiracial and pluralistic democracy, based on the misconception that rights and liberties are a zero-sum game, and that democracy should be exclusionary by design. In this worldview, historically marginalized groups must be continually oppressed, or "re-oppressed," to ensure that white "Christian" heterosexuals (and other "real Americans") can enjoy their full rights.

One of the Republican-fascist movement's greatest villains is Barack Obama, the country's first Black president, whose ascendance to power represented a symbolic triumph for multiracial democracy that the right found unacceptable. The very presence of Obama and his family in the White House was understood as an insult and provocation to the core values and beliefs of the Republican Party, the "conservative" movement and the larger white right.

In a sense, they had a point: Obama's presidency represented a diverse and more cosmopolitan America — and an existential threat to the vision of the country and its future embodied in Donald Trump's movement and the current Republican Party.

Eric Holder was attorney general of the United States under President Obama from 2009 to 2015. He was the first African American to hold that office in the country's history, and now serves as chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. His new book (with co-author Sam Koppelman) is "Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote — A History, a Crisis, a Plan."

In this wide-ranging conversation Holder explains his deep worries about American democracy in this moment of crisis. Holder also discusses the events of Jan. 6, 2021, which were a white supremacist attack on multiracial democracy -- as well as on Obama's legacy and the very idea of Black and brown people being in positions of leadership in American society.

Holder also discusses what we can learn from the Black Freedom Struggle for this moment of democracy crisis, and why the American people must organize and remain optimistic in the face of what will be a very long fight. Toward the end of this conversation, Holder explains why he believes that Donald Trump and other high-ranking members of his administration will ultimately be prosecuted by the Department of Justice for their crimes related to Jan. 6. We should have faith, he says, in the judgment and legal ethics of attorney general Merrick Garland, who now holds the job Holder had seven years ago.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling these days? More specifically, given all of the challenges we face in this country, how are you sleeping?

I'm a person who sleeps pretty well at night. I have the capacity to turn things off and get to sleep. That is usually the case. But I have found during the course of the pandemic that getting to sleep is a little more difficult. The pandemic is part of that of course.

I really mean this: Our democracy under attack has had an impact on me. I'll feel tired. I'll lay my head on the bed and say, "Boy, I'm really tired." And then my head starts spinning. I start thinking about, well, what's going on in Wisconsin? What's happening in Texas? What's going on in Georgia? Have we filed the appropriate lawsuits? What is happening with the Supreme Court? So many things.

What I've had to do, which I've never done before, is that I take out an iPad and watch a movie or an HBO series or something, just to stop thinking obsessively about these challenges to our democracy. At some point I just can't stay awake any longer and I go to sleep. The attacks on our democracy have really gotten to me. It really worries me.

What are you doing about those feelings of frustration? Many of us tried to warn the American people about the things that would happen if Donald Trump won the 2016 election. We were ignored, and we are still being ignored about the escalating crisis of democracy. What do we do with that energy?

What you just said is really important. What we must do is transform the frustration, the fear, the concern, into energy to do the required work. It's why I stay as active, as I have been, on all things related to voting. The ultimate relaxant for me is the knowledge that I'm doing all that I can. I am doing what the people who came before me did.

We are facing a very serious crisis. But other people in other times in this country have also faced crises that were even more serious, and the stakes for them were much higher. They potentially had to face losing their lives and their livelihoods. We don't generally face those kinds of personal consequences right now. For example, Medgar Evers, as we talk about in the new book, was carrying a bunch of T-shirts that say, "Jim Crow must go," on the same day that my sister-in-law integrated the University of Alabama. He must have been feeling pretty good that day, and then he was shot in his driveway.

We don't have those kinds of concerns. Our predecessors got through it. They got through their fear, their frustration, and they changed this nation. Especially for Black people, they were fighting for things unseen and fighting for concepts never experienced by them, in the hope that future generations would have opportunities that they didn't have. I owe them a great debt. I owe the future something better than the present. All those things help me and get me through the day.

The struggle never stopped. Once you stop fighting and you believe rights are secure, they will be taken away. Our long freedom struggle continues. Nothing is guaranteed.

That's a constant theme that one sees in this nation's history. We are part of a continuum that began in the 17th century. We're not facing anything that is totally unique. It is certainly different. As I described, the consequences perhaps are not as great on a personal level. But we're part of a continuing struggle. My father's generation that went to war in World War II came back to the United States and faced discrimination. Those Black men were fighting and struggling for democracy on foreign soil and then came back and got mistreated.

My father's personal story is that he was an immigrant from Barbados. He enlisted in the Army in his early 40s. He's in uniform and he's in North Carolina, and he is told to get to the back of a bus. In uniform, in war. He is told to get the back of a bus. He's in Oklahoma, trying to get a hamburger and he's told to go to the back of a lunch stand along with some other Black soldiers.

Well, his son grew up to be attorney general of the United States. There's a marker of progress there. His generation believed in the promise of this country in ways that I think we have to hold onto. My father wasn't a great civil rights leader. He was a good guy, one of the wisest men I've ever known. He didn't finish high school, but he did little things. The way he carried himself. The way he went to meetings and was involved in the community. We have it within ourselves, so-called ordinary people, the capacity to bring about great change.

We need charismatic, eloquent and wonderful leaders, of course. But those leaders need to have foot soldiers. Too often we forget those foot soldiers. We need to raise them up. We need to talk more about those people whose names we might have forgotten.

There's been a lot of change in America. But there are still these demons of racism and white supremacy that have not been exorcized. Your own life journey is an example of the changes America has experienced. But there was and continues to be so much racism, white supremacy and white backlash that is directly related to Barack Obama's presidency, and to Black and brown folks like you being in positions of authority. How do you reconcile this combination of progress and backlash?

I go back to my father and his generation. They loved this country when this country didn't love them back. That has been, in some ways, the history of people of color, and certainly African Americans, in this nation. We have demonstrated a love for this country and a devotion to the ideals of this country and have not always gotten back the kind of respect and love from this country that we deserve, given the seminal role that we played in the literal building of this country. We were asked to fight in wars, which we did, and were then denied the benefits of the sacrifices that we were asked to make and that we willingly gave.

I'm lucky. I'm privileged. I stand on the shoulders of people who sacrificed and gave their lives. Who, on a day to day basis, suffered indignities with a hope to achieve things unseen and in the future. So that people like me and Barack, and so many others obviously, would have opportunities that they never had. I feel really connected to them. I always have.

A white supremacist terrorist just killed 10 Black people in Buffalo. The connections to Dylann Roof and Charleston are obvious. How are you feeling? Do you have any advice for Black Americans about what to do with this pain, with this PTSD?

I am angry. At the same time, I think it is a moment where we need to revisit how generations of people of color before us experienced horrific events — not just in the form of mass atrocities, but also in the form of daily dehumanization. Having to go to the back of the bus. Being forced to take an impossible-to-pass literacy test. Lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terrorist organization, and other forms of state-sanctioned terror. The list goes on. We have made progress from those times because our ancestors knew they deserved better without having seen it for themselves. Instead of disengaging, they responded with engagement. They rejected the status quo. They organized. They protested. They lobbied their government.

Our country has never been perfect. But what makes this country worth fighting for is the fact that the people can improve it over time. We cannot lose sight of that at this moment.

Where do we go after Buffalo? This all feels like a terrible act of repetition, in terms of white supremacist terrorism and other violence against Black and brown people and other minority groups.

First and foremost, we have to call this event what it was: an act of domestic terrorism. Even during the previous administration, the FBI stated that white supremacist domestic terrorism posed the greatest domestic threat, and the FBI has continued to state this is the case today. So we have to equip federal agencies, state governments and local police departments with the tools they need to prevent future attacks. We also need to explore legislation on this issue. Contrary to the previous administration, President Biden was unequivocal in his remarks in Buffalo, and that leadership will help to make progress in the executive branch and elevate this issue in Congress.

It is also incumbent upon the people to stay involved. We must hold anyone who spreads racist conspiracy theories to account. If they hold elected office, we can and should organize to vote them out of office. Social media companies must do more to not allow this kind of speech to be spread and promoted. We will not be able to completely erase hate speech, but we can and must take action to hinder its ability to spread as much as possible.

What were you thinking on Jan. 6 of last year?

I didn't believe it. I had this powerful experience of cognitive dissonance. I'm watching something and my eyes are conveying images to me that my mind is processing, but on some basic level I didn't think that what I was seeing could actually be happening. I've been in and out of that building any number of times. To get confirmed. To get yelled at in hearings with Republicans. To meet with members of Congress to lobby for legislation. I have been there for inaugurations. To see people climbing the walls of Congress, wearing Camp Auschwitz T-shirts, hitting police officers, using pepper spray on law enforcement. It was hard to believe.

But on another level what happened that day was the manifestation of all my fears. There was this reaction to Barack's election. There were things released by the Trump election. And now it all came together on Jan. 6. All these people with these so-called grievances and this sense of mistreatment were there attacking the greatest symbol of our democracy.

Seeing a Confederate flag inside the halls of Congress? All of it was hard to believe. It was unbelievably enlightening yet frightening at the same time. It should be a wake-up call for everybody in this country. There is an illness among us. There is an illness in the body politic of this nation. It's like a cancer. If you leave it untreated, it will metastasize and it will consume us. We've got to take firm steps that begin with holding people accountable. Then we have to look at the country's institutions to make sure that what happened on Jan. 6 doesn't happen again.

As I watched that attack on the Capitol, I kept thinking to myself, "God, they hate Barack Obama that much. They hate Holder that much." I kept telling myself that they hate the reality and the symbolism of Black folks and our success, and the idea of multiracial democracy, so much that they're willing to tear it all down. Did it feel personal? Was your mind operating on that level?

Having been attorney general for six years and been attacked in a variety of ways, your skin does get pretty thick. I'm sure Barack would say the same thing. So yes, on a personal level, I understood what was happening there. But what was more worrisome are the symbols. They were not very subtle. Black people are very familiar with that imagery and what it means.

Gallows? On Jan. 6 they said they wanted to hang Mike Pence. As a Black person, you see a gallows there and a bunch of angry white folks and it brings up images of the "Strange Fruit" that Billie Holiday sang about.

Those Camp Auschwitz T-shirts. That language and imagery and what it represents has a very particular and powerful resonance for Jewish people. But we all know that Black folks would be right next in line with our Jewish brothers and sisters. The Confederate flag? What greater symbol of anti-Black feeling can you have than that?

So much of this was a reaction to the promise of Barack Obama. That reaction was not so much in response to Obama's policies. It was a reaction to the possibility of a true multiracial movement that potentially leads to a multiracial democracy the likes of which we had not seen in the United States since Reconstruction. Obama represented this new, emerging America that in terms of demographics is going to make the nation more brown than it is right now.

Ideologically, Obama also represents where I think the nation is going. The largest voting bloc we have in this country now are young people. There are more young people than baby boomers. Their ideological view, their view of the world, is quite different. That frightens those people who were out there on Jan. 6. America is changing. We can either embrace that change and make this century, the 21st century, another American century or we can let this change divide us, as we are presently doing. Those divisions will have a negative impact not only on the American people here at home, but also a negative impact on our ability to influence things outside our borders. A weakened America is not a good thing for the world.

Why haven't Donald Trump and the other members of his inner circle been prosecuted yet?

Justice means that the people who were responsible for Jan. 6, which includes the events leading up to that day, the ones who actually did the things on the 6th and then those people who were involved after that date, have to be held accountable.

As Merrick Garland said in his speech about Jan. 6, they have to be held responsible at any level. Merrick's a careful guy when it comes to the use of language. The fact that he put in those three words, "at any level," is an indication, at least to me, that they are looking at the entirety of who was involved with and responsible for Jan. 6. Accountability certainly has to be a huge component of justice.

But as we learn in law school, the purpose of the criminal law is not only to hold people accountable, it is to deter future similar conduct. I describe myself as an institutionalist. I'm reluctant to think about prosecuting people from a prior administration, which would potentially include a former president. It's divisive. But you have to hold people accountable. You have to speak to the future and say, if you even think about doing something like this, these are the consequences. You potentially will lose your liberty. You'll go to jail. Your reputation will be stained, and all the other negative consequences. We have to deter such future conduct.

The fact that Meadows' referral from Congress for contempt has not been dealt with, that's a tell. That's an indication that there's stuff going on, that they don't want to fool around with Meadows on contempt charges, out of concern of what that might do to what they're actively investigating him for. I would say, give them a little bit of time and we'll see what they do. But I am actually pretty confident that the DOJ will hold a whole bunch of high-level people accountable to deter people from doing things like this in the future.

I am of the school of thought that there is no way in hell that Donald Trump and his inner circle are going to jail.

You don't talk about ongoing investigations. You can't talk about the handling or the use of a grand jury. There is a whole range of things that can be going on underneath the surface. As I said, I'd say just be a little patient. Let the Jan. 6 [committee] hearings happen. After those hearings have occurred, then I think it's time to start looking for action from DOJ.

How can the average American, everyday people, get involved in saving this country's democracy? What should people be doing?

People need to have a sense of history. They need to get involved in ways that our current heroes and heroines are. For example, there is a woman named Love Caesar at North Carolina A&T. We talk about her in the new book. She was upset about the fact that North Carolina A&T was gerrymandered. They drew a line right down the middle of the campus. She got the campus together and ultimately pushed back against that North Carolina gerrymander successfully.

A man named Chris Hollins in Texas brought more people to vote in Harris County — in the middle of the pandemic, mind you — than had ever voted before in a presidential election. They are examples of how we as individuals, so-called ordinary citizens, can have an impact on the system. It doesn't mean it has to be political. There are a host of ways, big and small, in which we can improve the civic life of this country.

How do you maintain so much optimism in the fact of the crises and challenges we are facing?

If you look at the history of the United States and you reflect on from where we have come from and where we are, you understand that we have dealt with tough issues in the past and surmounted those challenges. People before me ended a system of American apartheid. We ripped down that system. America is at its best when it confronts the problems that bedevil it. We still have that capacity within ourselves.

There has been a long arc of progress in this country. It's not always a consistent arc, but overall it is an arc of progress, of involvement, of advancement. That is what I hold onto. My optimism propels me to the work. Pessimism would keep me in a sedentary state, and I'm by nature an active guy. I'm looking for solutions. I draw strength and optimism from those who came before me. I feel an obligation to them. If they sacrificed and they gave their lives, who am I not to be optimistic and keep doing the work in the present?

We warned the American people that electing Donald Trump would be a disaster. Unfortunately, too many Americans — from the political and media classes to everyday people — chose to ignore those warnings.

Our warnings were specific: Trump and his fake populist movement are a form of poison in the American body politic. Today's Republican Party and the larger "conservative" movement do not believe in democracy. They are authoritarians, trying to impose an apartheid Christian fascist plutocratic state on the American people.

If Trump were elected president, we warned, he would set into motion a series of events that would create an existential crisis for American democracy and society. He was mentally unwell, perhaps sociopathic. The civil rights and human rights of Black and brown people — and other vulnerable and marginalized groups — would be imperiled. Women's reproductive rights and freedoms, including the right to abortion enshrined in the Roe v. Wade decision, would be taken away.

All those predictions, and many others, have come true. At first, those of us who sounded the alarm about the coming American nightmare were called crazy, hyperbolic, reactionary or irrational. We were "haters," desperate for attention, who suffered from "Trump derangement syndrome."

As we now know from the draft Supreme Court opinion recently published by Politico, the end of Roe v. Wade is upon us, and abortion rights as a matter of constitutional law will no longer exist in the United States. The fall of Roe is a huge step forward in the much larger attack on human and civil rights in America by the Republican fascists, the "conservative" movement and the larger white right. Many Americans now find themselves trapped in the very nightmare whose existence they spent years denying.

Sometimes the ground moves beneath our feet. That is true for both societies and individuals. The challenge then becomes how to reorient ourselves

How did well-intentioned people in America's political class, and ordinary citizens who believe in democracy, get this so wrong? How did they so greatly underestimate the danger of Trumpism?

"Normalcy bias," meaning the belief that because things have operated in a certain way for as long as many people can remember, explains much of this error. Intellectual laziness and a culture of distraction played a big role as well. Trumpism, like other forms of fascism, is nothing new. The answers (and the likely future) were visible for all who chose to look for them.

The American people are also exhausted from a pandemic that has now killed more than one million people in this country alone. A decades-long attack on the American Dream and what remains of social democracy has also left many of us in a state of precarity, perpetual vulnerability and learned helplessness. People who are mired in negativity and feelings of despair can easily succumb to cynicism, distrust, religious extremism, conspiratorial thinking, anti-intellectualism and other unhealthy states of mind. These are the same emotions, thinking, and behaviors that nurture fascism and other forms of authoritarianism.

There is also the power of American myth, and our belief that we are an an "exceptional" nation, the "greatest" on Earth. According to that mythology, the American people are inherently good, and fascism and authoritarianism are problems that by definition can only exist elsewhere. Even in the wake of the Trump presidency, many Americans are still in denial about the fact that tens of millions of their fellow (white) citizens reject multiracial democracy and want to replace it with outright fascism or some other form of racial authoritarianism.

What about America's political elites? What about the "thought leaders" in the news media and the commentariat, who are paid to be expert interpreters of political events? How did they fail to see this nightmare emerging?

Such people have a deep and abiding belief in "the system." To imagine that "the system" is failing is to call into question their own identities and futures relative to it. Few people want to reckon with their own obsolescence. At an even deeper level, many people who are part of that system reflexively resist confronting their own role in creating and worsening this disaster.

A person who is associated with the "system" or the "establishment" is also very likely a person privileged by that system, whether because of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, wealth and income, residency status, lack of disability or something else. So for many members of the media and political elite, it is not possible to conceive of this American nightmare in general, or the end of Roe in particular, as something that is real, possible, and personal. Those people find themselves in an altered world yet are still in denial about it. The cognitive dissonance borders on being pathological.

Author and Daily Beast writer Wajahat Ali recently described this state of denial on Twitter:

All of us — who were denounced as reactionary and alarmist by those paid incredible sums of money to be analysts and influencers — were right. That's the problem with the DC/NYC circle — it's a small, closed, often homogeneous group who only hang out with each other.

Cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan offered a similar intervention, writing: "I can't believe that there are people who have lived through the past six years in America who still believe we operate according to the democratic norms of the late 20th century. The rest of us are dealing with this full-on assault in the real world."

At Mother Jones, Monika Bauerlein shared these insights about the power of denial among America's media class, writing that Republicans were pursuing "minority rule" and that "sugarcoating" that fact with polite words helps no one:

In fact, there's an argument that sugarcoating the abortion debate is part of what got us here. As the journalist Farai Chideya, who hosts the podcast Our Body Politic, wrote on Twitter, "Too many times I've been in newsrooms where a post-Roe and post-Voting Rights Act future was dismissed summarily as a possibility. So we as a profession created a dangerous filter bubble, dismissing individuals and groups as fringe when they were the tip of the spear."

In a democracy, the fourth estate is supposed to hold the powerful accountable in order to help the public make informed political decisions. In this context, the fourth estate are the harbor masters of democracy, helping to navigate ships through dangerous waters. But in the dark and turbulent waters of the Trump era, the harbor masters have become confused. They keep driving vessels onto the rocks. The wrecks are piling up, but the harbor masters insist their maps must be correct.

We have seen this repeatedly throughout the Age of Trump and beyond: The country's leading publications will shine a bright light on the Republican plot against democracy — but then, the next day or sometimes later on the same day, will pivot back to the very same both-sides coverage and horserace journalism that led to America's democracy crisis in the first place.

It is no wonder, then, that the American people are confused, angry and disoriented. The voices who are supposed to make complicated matters of politics and society clearer and more legible have utterly failed to fulfill their responsibility.

The imminent end of Roe v. Wade will pose a great test for American democracy. Many Americans will certainly participate in marches and other protests when the Republican-controlled Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe v. Wade, very likely next month. Civil society organizations are mobilizing their members and the larger public. The Democrats hope to use outrage over the Republican assault on reproductive rights and freedoms to mobilize their voters for the midterms and beyond. Organizations across the country are enacting plans to ensure that women and girls who choose to terminate their pregnancies can do so.

Inevitably, this mobilization for women's rights and freedoms will be met by a powerful counter-mobilization from the right-wing. Extreme violence by the latter is a definite possibility.

This plan has one huge problem: Democratic mobilization is all well and good, but today's Republicans and "conservatives", and the larger white right do not believe in democracy and are actively seeking to destroy it. The nullification of Roe v. Wade is a stark example of the tyranny of the minority: The Supreme Court's decision is widely unpopular and contrary to the common good. It also violates fundamental human rights and liberties and damages democracy.

In a functioning democracy, public opinion is supposed to serve as a barometer and guide for elected officials and their policymaking. Marches, mobilization and social movements are forms of pressure on elected officials and other elites. But the Republican-fascist movement and other "conservatives" do not care about that. They are creating a political system that allows them to advance their agenda without being limited or otherwise restrained by public pressure or democratic will.

To wit. The reversal of Roe v. Wade is the work of two anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic political institutions, the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court. To make matters even clearer, five of the nine current Supreme Court justices were nominated by Republican presidents who did not win the popular vote.

Three of those justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were chosen by Donald Trump. He lost the popular vote twice, was impeached twice, attempted a coup, and engaged in a long list of high crimes against American democracy and society. In practice, Trump is also a white supremacist, a fascist demagogue, and a political cult leader.

As for the Senate, it disproportionately empowers smaller, largely rural "red" states over more populous, metropolitan "blue" states, where the vast majority of Americans live. The Republicans have also used the Senate filibuster to prevent the Democrats from passing major legislation, including popular measures to protect reproductive rights, voting rights, and democracy in general.

To insulate themselves from public outrage about Roe v. Wade (and other unpopular policies) the Republicans use gerrymandering, vote rigging, voter intimidation, vote theft and other anti-democratic measures to restrict the voting rights of Black and brown Americans and other key Democratic constituencies.

Writing at Jacobin, Ben Beckett connects the impending Roe v. Wade decision to the larger Republican-fascist project, describing the current Supreme Court as the right's "most powerful weapon" in establishing rule "against the people":

While the Supreme Court is especially insulated from democracy and accountability, this authoritarian impulse has always been at the core of conservatism, and the Right has always had a tenuous relationship to democracy. Historically, it has only acceded to democratic demands kicking and screaming, and it has consistently tried to roll back democratic practices and revert power to unaccountable elites. ...
While the desire to overturn Roe v. Wade long precedes Donald Trump's presidency, Alito's decision is best understood in the context of the broader counter-democratic movement that has been picking up steam for the past seven years….
There is no reason to think this will get any better, or to expect another outcome when it comes to other important issues. ... There is a special sense of helplessness here. Anyone who pays even a little bit of attention to politics knows exactly what will happen, and knows that no one will stop it. The justices will surely continue to find reasons to strike down popular legislation and regulations that were enacted by "the people and their elected representatives," just as surely as they will find reasons to return questions of individual liberty, voting rights, and freedom of assembly and expression to state governments dominated by conservative extremists sure to restrict them. ... It's all just motivated reasoning for raw power: they're all for democracy, as long as they can first guarantee that they'll win.

In a new essay for the New Republic, Katherine Stewart describes the impending reversal of Roe as "the direct consequence of the pact between the Republican Party and America's religious nationalists":

Tellingly, the authoritarian origins of the decision are written into the draft opinion itself, which ... will serve as a model and platform for advancing a wider assault on individual rights and American democracy for the benefit of a privileged few. Women of childbearing age are among the first victims of the authoritarian movement that brought us a radicalized Supreme Court. They won't be the last….
Depriving individuals of their rights is only half of the work of a court bent on paving the way for a Christian nationalist regime. The other half consists in dispensing privileges to favored groups….
Anyone who cares about the rights of individuals against tyranny should fight the court's apparent decision on abortion rights. But unless we make the fight about the takeover of the court itself — and unless it brings about the changes that this corrupted institution requires—the existential threat to American democracy will persist.

Political scientists and other researchers have shown that Congress is largely unresponsive to the policy demands of working class and poor people and instead takes its directives from the plutocrat class and large corporations. That is another important aspect of the new America Republicans and "conservatives" are trying to create: a fake democracy where it will be virtually impossible to defeat Republicans by electoral means.

Does that mean the American people should surrender to the fascists, or hunker down and wait out the storm? Of course not. They must go beyond thinking of democracy as a matter of voting every few years, donating to causes or candidates, attending protests or marches once or twice year, writing letters to elected official or "liking" and "sharing" a news item, petition or political meme online.

Democracy is much more than those things. To defeat neofascism, the American people must come to understand democracy as a vocation and cultural practice. That means participating in local civic organizations and creating social change on an intimate, personal, community-based level.

This moment also demands a commitment to long-term struggle: winning back and protecting reproductive rights, voting rights and other essential aspects of democracy and freedom may well be a decades-long battle. Defeating the Republican-fascists and the larger white right will also require learning the lessons of the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the LGBTQ rights movement and other freedom struggles. Corporeal politics, including strikes, sustained protests, boycotts and other forms of civil disobedience, potentially on an unprecedented scale, may well be required to win back American democracy.

This American nightmare is not going away anytime soon. The Republican-fascist movement will only become more aggressive with the end of Roe v. Wade. It is winning, and can sense larger victories ahead.

This test of democracy will not be a matter of one finite event, one year or one political campaign. Do the American people have the courage and fortitude for the long fight? Or will they simply convince themselves that this must be the new normal and therefore acceptable? America's future depends on the answer to those questions.

In America, there is one set of rules, laws and justice for rich white men and another set for everyone else. Donald Trump is living proof of that fact. Despite overwhelming public evidence of his high crimes, it appears likely that the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, will not recommend to the Department of Justice that Trump should face criminal charges. This abdication of responsibility — to speak plainly, this act of cowardice — in the name of politics and appearances is a horrible mistake.

Indeed, it appears increasingly likely that there will be few if any negative consequences for Trump and his fellow coup plotters for their numerous crimes. In total, Jan. 6 may be one of the greatest crimes in American history and also one of the least punished, offering another example of how American democracy is dying, a little bit at a time.

Last Sunday, The New York Times reported that the leaders of the House committee "have grown divided" over the question of whether to make a criminal referral regarding Trump to the Justice Department, "even though they have concluded that they have enough evidence to do so." Some committee members are reportedly "questioning whether there is any need to make a referral," partly in hopes that Attorney General Merrick Garland has his own investigation underway, and partly out of reluctance "to saddle a criminal case with further partisan baggage" at a moment when Trump is openly flirting with another presidential campaign.

This shift in strategy, the Times reports is related to the ruling two weeks ago by a federal judge in California who found that it was "more likely than not" that Trump and his legal adviser, John Eastman, had both committed federal crimes:

The ruling led some committee and staff members to argue that even though they felt they had amassed enough evidence to justify calling for a prosecution, the judge's decision would carry far greater weight with Mr. Garland than any referral letter they could write, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
The members and aides who were reluctant to support a referral contended that making one would create the appearance that Mr. Garland was investigating Mr. Trump at the behest of a Democratic Congress and that if the committee could avoid that perception it should, the people said.

It's certainly true that the House Jan. 6 committee is controlled by the Democrats, since only two renegade Republicans agreed to take part. But if its leaders decline to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution, they will demonstrate once again that they lack the most basic understanding of how the Republican Party, and the larger neofascist movement surrounding it, pose an existential threat to the future of the United States.

It is not just that today's Democratic Party is "bad at politics," although that's true enough. The deeper truth is even worse: The Democrats are engaging in willful self-sabotage.

The examples are many. Republicans overwhelmingly view Democrats as their enemies, yet Democratic leaders continue to view Republicans as possible or at least potential partners in good government. The Democratic Party's leaders behave as though they truly believe that the Republicans' embrace of fascism and authoritarianism is just a phase or passing flirtation that will soon fade.

Such a pretense is beyond naïve. In a moment of existential democracy crisis, it is actually dangerous stupidity.

Today's Republican Party and the larger white right have abandoned normal politics with its expectations of compromise, respect for existing democratic norms and institutions, and a shared investment in protecting the country's democratic culture. They have instead become a reactionary revolutionary party, embracing political paralysis and destruction. As the entire nation should have learned on Jan. 6, Republicans and the white right view political violence and terrorism as a legitimate means to achieve their goals. To this point, the Democrats have offered no effective response.

Republicans no longer believe that the Democrats (or liberals, progressives or the "left") should have any legitimacy, power, authority or social standing. Their ultimate goal is to create a one-party state along the lines of Hungary, Turkey or Russia, governed by what political scientists describe as a system of "competitive authoritarianism."

Republican leaders have already signaled that if and when they take control of the House of Representatives after the 2022 midterms they are likely to impeach Joe Biden, follow through on their witch-hunt obsessions with his son Hunter, launch innumerable investigations of the Democrats for imaginary crimes and corruption, continue to advance Trump's Big Lie and more generally do everything possible to stop the Democrats from passing any legislation or pursuing any policy reforms. They will almost certainly also do whatever they can to overturn existing legislation, however popular those policies may be, in pursuit of their revolutionary goal to remake American society in their own evil image.

Disbanding the Jan. 6 House select committee will almost literally be Republicans' first priority, and they may well replace it with some McCarthy-style kangaroo court designed to punish those who stood up to Donald Trump's incipient fascist regime. Yet in the face of all this, Democratic leaders and the Jan. 6 committee remain concerned, first and foremost, about political optics, even as their Republican "colleagues" continue to give aid and comfort to Trump's followers and the larger neofascist movement.

At the New Republic, Michael Tomasky explores the logic behind the concerns that a criminal referral of Trump might "backfire":

Democrats really have to stop worrying about things backfiring and just do them. Of course it may backfire. Lots of things may backfire. That isn't a reason not to do them.
Do Republicans worry about things backfiring? Hardly ever that I can see. They just do them. Eighty jillion Benghazi hearings. Voting, as nearly 150 of them did, to deny Joe Biden the presidency. Pushing these blatantly undemocratic voter-suppression laws. They never worry about backfiring. The irony is that sometimes their zealotry does backfire on Republicans. The impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired on Newt Gingrich such that he lost his job over it. But they just keep on doing outrageous things, and their winning percentage, tragically, is pretty good.
In other words: The backfiring worry is very overstated in a hyper-polarized age. Of course a formal referral will infuriate Trumpists. And it will give Trump a little fodder to complain about a partisan 'witch hunt.' But Democrats can counter that the committee has two Republicans. Liberals will nod, conservatives will be enraged, and most voters in the middle will shrug. It's a relatively minor thing, this referral. There's no harm in doing it.

In an essay for MSNBC, Charles Sykes warns that the select committee and the Justice Department "both seem to be caught in a cycle of hand-wringing":

They worry about the 'taint' of a referral and agonize over fears that Trump and the GOP will discredit any investigation as a partisan witch hunt.
But here's a reality check: No matter what they do, no matter how cautiously they act, Trump will react with bad faith and demagoguery.
The Justice Department could hire an avatar of respectability and integrity to handle the prosecution (see: Robert Mueller) — and it wouldn't matter. Whatever it does, Trump will let loose the dogs of disinformation, deceit and obstruction.
Knowing it can't control the reaction, maybe the select committee should just do the right thing — and finally, finally end the cycle of timidity, self-deterrence and buck-passing.

Public opinion polls show that an increasingly large percentage of Americans have lost interest in the events of Jan. 6. and want the entire matter to be thrown down the memory hole. A great deal of this sentiment results from the fact that many leading Democrats and pundits repeatedly say that Trump and the Republicans are a threat to American democracy, yet in real-world terms do not act as if that really matters. Why should the American people care that Trump and his cabal attempted to overthrow democracy if the Democrats are continuing with business as usual?

In their losing war against the Republicans, the "conservative" movement and the larger white right, the Democrats have been trading space for time since at least Barack Obama's presidency. By comparison, the Republicans are constantly on the attack, spreading the "critical race theory" moral panic, circulating the QAnon conspiracy theory, weaponizing anti-LGBTQ bigotry or terrorizing white parents with lies that Democrats are sexual predators who are "grooming" children. Republicans have all the momentum on their side and are using it to shape the political battlefield such that Democrats are forced to react from a position of weakness.

As documented by historian Nancy MacLean and other experts, and contrary to what some observers would like to believe, Republicans are not simply improvising their culture-war tactics. When viewed in the aggregate, these attacks serve a highly refined strategy. Democrats also seem to think that somehow the Republican-fascists and their allies will become tired, or will have an epiphany that their cause is immoral, irrational or misguided.

As is their habit, the Democrats and too many liberals are projecting their own reasoning and motivations onto their enemies. This too is a classic mistake in politics or war.

The Republican Party and the neofascist movement are engaged, energized and willing to fight. In comparison, most Democrats — whether "centrists," mainstream liberals or left-progressives — appear exhausted, frustrated and increasingly demobilized.

If the House select committee decides not to issue a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Trump's crimes, that marks another Democratic Party surrender in the battle to protect American democracy. The Republican-fascists and their allies have no respect for the supposed rules of political combat in a democracy. Moreover, they have consistently demonstrated that they will offer no quarter or compassion to their opposition. They view the Democrats' talk about bipartisanship, compromise, consensus and democratic norms with contempt, as a form of weakness not worthy of respect.

In the end, the Democratic Party and its leaders must approach this political battle not as "normal" politics but as a life-or-death struggle for the future of American democracy and society. Victory in war is all too often fundamentally determined by the human factors: morale, discipline, dedication, belief in the cause and motivation. By those criteria, the Democrats are losing badly. Is it too late for them to turn the tide?

Almost every day offers more evidence of how American fascism is becoming a reality. We now know for certain that Donald Trump and his coup cabal attempted to overthrow American democracy on Jan. 6, 2021. The coup continues as Republicans and their agents are attacking America's multiracial democracy in dozens of states, seeking to make it impossible for Black and brown Americans and other Democratic Party constituents to have their votes counted fairly.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, a former Trump ally, said last week that, well after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump continued his seditious attempts to pressure members of Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump himself, along with acolytes such as Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon, continue to threaten and incite political violence against those deemed to be the enemy. At a rally last Saturday in Georgia, for instance, Trump continued to threaten violence against members of the media, calling them "animals."

As Salon's Igor Derysh reported last week, Trump's followers have been allegedly been going door-to-door in Black and brown communities in Colorado, engaging in acts of voter intimidation and harassment that echo the Jim Crow era of white supremacist terror and violence.

As shown by the vile attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory has made major inroads into the so-called mainstream of the Republican Party. Federal and local law enforcement agencies continue to disrupt right-wing terror plots across the United States.

The rising neofascist tide is global: Some white supremacists and other right-wing extremists see the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to gain combat experience they can later use in their battle against multiracial democracy and pluralistic society in the U.S. and other Western nations. Experts on political violence, fascism and other forms of political extremism continue to sound the alarm about the perilous moment now facing the United States, where democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Their warnings have been largely ignored by the country's political elites and the public more generally.

Barbara Walter is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, political violence and terrorism. She is also a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has consulted for the State Department, the Department of Defense, the UN and the World Bank. Her essays and other commentaries have been featured at CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Walter's new book is "How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them."

In this conversation, Walter warns that the American people and their leaders have been blinded by a type of "status quo bias" that prevents them from responding properly to the democracy crisis and the danger of widespread political violence. She argues that privilege and a lack of historical experience with oppression have combined to create a state of willful myopia and denial for most white Americans about the existential peril the country now faces.

Walter draws upon some of the darkest moments in human history, such as the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, to explain why so many (white) Americans will likely remain in denial about the country's descent into civil war and other massive violence, even as the carnage is imminent or already happening around them. She warns that many people will comply, or perhaps collaborate, with the right-wing extremists who are committing worsening acts of terror and political violence.

Walter does hold out some hope, however, and offers potential solutions to help mitigate this crisis, including new restrictions on the way social media platforms circulate and amplify politically extreme content.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Donald Trump continues to threaten political violence against his "enemies" if he is punished for his crimes. Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and other right-wing propagandists are also threatening political violence on a near-daily basis across the right-wing media echo chamber. The FBI and law enforcement continue to uncover potential right-wing terrorist plots. Why are so few people taking these dangers of right-wing violence seriously?

I believe it is human nature for people to not want to believe that they and their fellow citizens are capable of such things. Many people want to live in a world of wishful thinking where life is going to continue to go on in the same way that it always has.

If it is sunny today and you go to work and afterwards you have drinks with friends and then there is the weekend when you get to watch football and it's like that today, your bias is that it's always going to be that way.

People are status-quo biased. They truly believe that the way things are today is the way that things are going to be forever. As a result, many people do not see the warning signs. What is so amazing is that throughout history, violent extremists are often very public about their intentions, what their goals are and what strategy they're going to pursue to achieve those goals. Hitler is perhaps the best example. He wrote and published "Mein Kampf," laying out exactly what he intended to do. If you look at neo-Nazis and other white supremacists here in the United States and elsewhere, they have a book called "The Siege" which details exactly what their plans and intentions are.

The bible of the alt-right is a book called "The Turner Diaries." It lays out exactly how they intend to start a second civil war in the United States. "The Turner Diaries" includes an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and in that book a working gallows is erected outside the Capitol where they're going to bring "traitors" out for trial and then kill them. They're not hiding what they intend to do, and yet throughout history, the people who are at risk have not taken those messages, warnings and manifestos seriously.

In societies at risk for widespread political violence, is it common for the public and its leaders to be in a state of denial? For people to just ignore the obvious threats or say it is all just hyperbole?

As a social scientist, the example I would start with would be the Jews across Europe prior to the Holocaust because there is a very interesting variation in how Jews responded by country. There is also a noteworthy variation in terms of how Jews responded to the perceived threat of persecution and how communists and socialists responded.

In terms of the Jews in Europe, it was German Jews who had their heads in the sand the most and refused to see the disaster that was about to hit them. They actually could read "Mein Kampf." Many Polish Jews and Romanian Jews saw what was coming and tried to take action by fleeing Europe. The German Jews, less so. Why was this?

The German Jews were highly educated. They were cosmopolitan, they were the most assimilated. They were the most vested in the status quo. They were not living in ghettos, and they had not experienced pogroms until more recently. Therefore, many German Jews believed that they were going to be relatively untouched or that they had a vested interest in the society.

The German Jews were more likely to be caught by surprise, whereas if you are a Jewish person living in Poland, you've been ghettoized your whole existence, you've been the target of violence, you already know what the state is capable of. You know what your fellow citizens are capable of. You've seen the evidence of that. Such violence does not take you by surprise.

I think a similar dynamic is happening here in the United States. The American people as a whole have not witnessed the horrible things that human beings can do to each other because they have not been the target of such violence — except, of course, for African-Americans and other people of color who do see the approaching violence and disaster. Many white Americans do not want to see it. They do not want to hear the metaphorical train that is coming at them because they have not been targets of such violence as a group.

White Americans as a group tend not to believe the warnings by Black and brown people and others who see what is happening. Because they haven't had the direct experience, the hard evidence, of such things being true. I also believe that's because white Americans have a vested interest in the system. They really want to believe that the system is OK, and if they just keep their heads down and just weather this storm, everything's going to be OK.

How do people reconcile their wishes and dreams, or their delusions, with the obvious facts?

Trump and Flynn are preaching violence. You can quote them on it. If you read what they are saying, it is shocking. Yet few people seem to know about it. If I were to show what Trump and Flynn are saying, their actual words, to the average American, they would say, "You're making that up, it can't be true." Thus we have a situation where these things are happening, but the information is not being shared with the general public, or if they are hearing what is happening then it is being distorted or not fully represented in a way that leaves most Americans ignorant of what is really going on.

Historically, the side that wants to do these horrible things and put themselves in a position of power, to lead a dictatorship or start a "race war" or commit acts of genocide — for example, to kill all the Jews in Europe — will spend a lot of time investing in propaganda because they understand that if they can control the narrative they can control the average citizen. That is exactly what is happening now in the United States. Experts and other people like us see the warning signs because we're paying attention and we're reading widely. Most Americans are not.

At one of Trump's recent rallies, he told his followers to be ready to die to defeat "critical race theory." Michael Flynn recently told his audience he wanted them to "charge machine gun nests" in service to their cause. How do you fit these examples within your model of a second civil war or other massive violence in the United States?

One of the challenges that violent extremists have is how to expand their base of support. If they don't expand their support base, they just remain fringe movements forever. One way is to provoke a harsh government response. Let's say that there are peaceful protests, but then there are provocateurs there who try to get the police to open fire or to bash a few heads. Violence entrepreneurs will use those actions as evidence that the police or the government or the opposition are evil and intent on crushing them.

That tactic is often successful in radicalizing at least some portion of average citizens. It pushes them towards the extremists. Donald Trump is what I would describe as an "ethnic entrepreneur." He and his loyalists want to regain power. He is an autocrat. Trump has no interest in ruling democratically. But Trump is not going to get that power back without the support of the average white American. This means that Donald Trump has to convince them somehow that his is a worthy cause to defend.

How many people, in terms of a whole population, does such a movement need to take over society and impose its will on the public?

There is not much data on that question. Research suggests that perhaps 3% of the population is necessary to challenge whatever leader or group is in power. That is a quite small percentage, but if there is 3% of the American population out in the streets in a sustained way, it is actually enormous. You do not need a lot of people to start a civil war that's going to be incredibly costly to the country as a whole. All they would need are a few militia groups who are effective at targeting infrastructure and shutting down the economy.

What has the response been to your book and its warnings about a second civil war or right-wing insurgency in America?

To my great surprise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People are reading the book. I didn't think that was going to happen. I didn't think Americans would want to read about the possibility of a civil war or read a book that is terrifying. And they did, in large numbers. But the second response has really been that 90% of the emails I get are people thanking me. They're grateful. They have been worried about what they're seeing and feeling in the country. The most grateful emails I get are from people who live in rural areas, who thank me for shedding light on this problem.

There are people who say I am being an alarmist and that somehow I am making a second American civil war more likely by talking about it. The reality is that we know that violent extremists on the far right have been growing significantly, especially since 2008. You can read what their plans are. You can see that many of them are stockpiling weapons and going through maneuvers and training for war. These right-wing groups were sending some of their members to Ukraine, prior to the Russian invasion, to gain combat experience. We know that these right-wing extremists are actively recruiting from former members of the military because they want individuals with combat experience.

What these right-wing extremists want more than anything else is for the rest of the American people to ignore them, because that way they can grow their numbers, get more training, and when they're ready to act they'll have the element of surprise on their side. These right-wing extremists are a relatively small, weak group. Any militias in the United States are going to be small relative to the U.S. military. They need the element of surprise. I wish that it were true that if we did not talk about this threat, it would go away. That is simply not the case.

I see a situation where the right wing is already engaging in acts of lethal violence and is mobilizing for widespread violence. It is a one-way battle at this point. Liberals, progressives and other pro-democracy Americans are doing little, if anything, to defend their country against the threat. I fear that once they realize what the neofascists and right-wing extremists are preparing to do, it will be too late.

In the CIA's manual on insurgencies there are three stages. The United States is in the second stage. The CIA calls it the "incipient conflict stage," and it is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City was probably the very earliest instance. Here is what the CIA manual says, almost verbatim: "The insurgents' goal is to broadcast their mission to the world, build support and provoke a government overreaction to their violence so that more moderate citizens become radicalized and join the movement."

The second stage is when the government becomes aware of the groups behind these attacks, but according to the CIA, the violence is often dismissed as the work of bandits, criminals or terrorists. What is so dangerous about the second stage is that citizens, politicians and law enforcement usually miss it. They don't connect the dots, they don't see that the movement is growing and that this is a precursor to open insurgency. Instead, these attacks are dismissed as idiosyncratic or the result of crazy people who have no connection to a larger movement. That's exactly where we are today.

When you and other experts use the term "civil war," how is it defined?

Experts use it as a type of umbrella term. Underneath that umbrella are all sorts of different forms of violence that can happen within a country. Civil wars mean violence that's fought by a domestic group within a country that targets the government for political purposes. It becomes a civil war or a major civil war if it kills a thousand people during the course of the war.

Civil war can take different forms. There are social revolutions, such as the Russian Revolution or Mao's revolution in China. Social revolution is the most destructive type of civil war. It's a civil war where the rebels want complete political, economic and social change. There can also be a violent coup that kills a thousand people and is contained to a capital city. There is everything in between.

What we tend to see frequently in countries with powerful militaries are insurgencies. These tend to be more decentralized and usually fought by multiple militias and paramilitary groups. These militias have political goals, but their methods are very different. They don't want to engage the military directly for the most part, don't want to target soldiers, because if they engage the U.S. military, for example, they're going to lose. They instead use unconventional methods, like guerrilla warfare, hit-and-run attacks, domestic terrorism, where they're targeting the soft underbelly of a society, such as civilian infrastructure. In the United States we are not going to see a civil war like we saw in the 1860s.

What do we know about the public mood and emotion in a society that is about to experience a civil war or other mass violence?

The groups that tend to start these civil wars and insurgencies are driven by resentment. As such, the groups who decide that violence is a justifiable means to try to create political and social change are those that are losing status and have a deep sense of resentment towards other groups who are perceived as rising or doing better. These are the "sons of the soil" groups.

It is that resentment that motivates their leaders. Average citizens are motivated by a different emotion to follow such leaders. That emotion is fear, which is an incredible motivator for average citizens to pick up a gun and start fighting. Ethnic entrepreneurs, violence entrepreneurs — those individuals who want to start a civil war to catapult themselves to power — understand the power of fear. What they do is create propaganda and circulate it among average citizens. They tell them that their lives are under threat.

In a given society, and most certainly here in the United States, most members of the general public, white Americans and privileged people in particular, are fence-sitters. They may know that something is deeply wrong in the country, but they will do nothing about it. What does that oft-discussed "silent majority" actually do when a society starts to fall apart and people are killing each other?

Such people are going to hold on to hope as long as they can. They're going to plug their ears and cover their eyes and engage in wishful thinking as long as they can. And then, when something happens and they're forced to choose sides, their base instinct is to survive and to do whatever they need to do to survive.

If there is a paramilitary group that is putting up roadblocks on their street, if there's a group of people wearing all black with no insignias controlling a roadblock in a neighborhood with machine guns, the average person is going to do whatever those people want them to do. Survival drives behavior. Those fence-sitters are going to hope they're not going to become the targets of the violence.

Not all the far-right groups are white supremacists, but many of them are. What they want is for the United States to become a white "ethnostate," or at the very least for certain states like Michigan to become white ethnostates. These white supremacists understand that if they don't shoot at white people, then many white people are probably just going to keep their heads down and not do anything. It's exactly what happened in places like Germany, where if you see that the Germans are targeting Jews, you do everything possible to make sure that you aren't identified as a Jew. I believe that the average human who is trying to survive will do a whole lot of ugly things to keep themselves alive.

How do we prepare the American people for this civil war or insurgency or other such right-wing violence? Will it be a series of escalating events? Isolated acts of violence? Something spectacular, like 9/11?

Their ideal scenario is to coordinate, so that on a given day there would be multiple attacks. As I see it, it would almost feel like 9/11, where you wake up in the morning and you're watching TV and you know that something has happened and everything seems chaotic. You're not really sure who's in charge or what type of threat this is and what you should do about it.

I see a scenario where there are bombings in multiple state capitals, or a series of assassinations, or maybe both at the same time. Suddenly the federal government is facing a leaderless resistance. The country's leaders are trying to figure out how to respond. In the meantime, the American people are watching this all happen and wondering: What the hell's going on, who's in charge, and what should we do?

Some of these right-wing militias are going to want to capture territory in certain parts of the country and hold it. Some of them are going to pursue their own agendas. For example, I could imagine militias in Michigan saying, "We're never going to gain control of the federal government, but Michigan could be a white state — we just have to convince all the nonwhites to leave. We do that by bombing their churches and targeting their stores with attacks. Eventually, the nonwhites will be forced to move south and we'll ultimately get what we want."

If the right-wing extremists are not able to coordinate their attacks, then we are just going to see a series of consistent attacks every few weeks. There will be a feeling that the country is under siege. Northern Ireland is a great example of this. The British military, as strong as it was, could not get rid of the IRA. The IRA continued to operate until the British government eventually negotiated with them.

If you had 15 minutes to brief President Biden or Attorney General Garland, what would you highlight as the first steps they should take to contain this threat?

Regulate social media. It's the easiest thing that the U.S. government can do. The five biggest tech companies are all American companies. Don't engage in censorship. Let people put whatever they want on social media, but regulate what tech companies are allowed to do in terms of their recommendation engines. Don't allow them to take the most incendiary material and push it out to the widest possible audience, because that is causing a range of really negative societal effects. These include helping to accelerate the decline of democracy, helping to grow the rise of ethnic nationalism and hate crimes and helping to make it easier to organize militias. Regulating social media would be the quickest and easiest way to reverse these negative effects.

Editor's Note: This story originally appeared without a commentary tag. AlterNet regrets the error.

The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats, for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved "birth defect" at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most "moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative" Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters and Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods or communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or have other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day life.

To the degree that "race" is a proxy for political values and beliefs, the color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan identity and voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided by politics. For example, public opinion research shows that white right-wing evangelical Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian views, conspiracy theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial values.

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person's political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.

Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his movement.

America's struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative-authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing threats and dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, demonstrates that America's democracy crisis may be even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent article "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," which appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that there are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or another candidate, or who did not vote at all.

Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and level of education, but until now not to "cognitive sophistication," which was found "to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on choosing Trump." He notes that "philosophers and political elites have debated the potential effects of mass political participation" for generations, concerned "about the unsophisticated masses coming under the sway of a demagogue." In effect, this debate was always about the quality he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it "may not be able to understand and access reliable and valid information about political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda":

Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic style presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited education and cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T.W.] Adorno's classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical works have linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with right-wing orientations....

Trump's campaign may also have been more attractive to people with low cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information processing because compared to other candidates Trump's speeches were given at a much lower reading level…. While much of the Trump campaign's rhetoric and orientation may have resonated with the poorly educated and cognitively unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are less likely to register to vote or to turn out in an election.

As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making and cognition of Trump's voters, using a 10-point vocabulary exam. In a guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:

Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who missed all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling for education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average on the exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had a perfect score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.

Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can be identified within educational groups. While non-college whites certainly turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not — only 38% of those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump, and only 46% of non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation above the mean. The same is true for college graduates — low cognition college graduates were more likely to vote for Trump. ...

What is really depressing isn't just the poles of the vocabulary exam, it's the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 — so half of white Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions.

Most people have heard the most famous truisms about armed conflict. No plan, we are told, survives contact with the enemy. In any war, truth is the first casualty. Of course, there is "the fog of war."

Those truisms are playing out in real-time in Russia's war against Ukraine. Much of the American and Western media is focused on sensational stories and images of human struggle and loss, rather than on the larger picture of what is really happening on the ground in this grinding, brutal conflict. Coverage is dominated by dueling propaganda narratives in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a saint and his besieged nation is a "brave little Belgium" (a First World War reference) while Vladimir Putin is an "irrational" bully, driven solely by a desire for mayhem and evil.

Digital media means that we see nearly real-time coverage of events on the ground in Ukraine — but that has produced at least as much confusion — if not more — among the general public than traditional media coverage. In total, much of the global public's understanding of what is actually happening in the Ukraine conflict has been clouded by information overload.

Punditry has gone into overdrive: A global crisis attracts experts, both genuine and self-appointed, who are trotted out by the 24/7 cable news machine to offer sometimes questionable or dubious "insights" to a global public hungry for answers.

We hear, of course, the usual narratives of American exceptionalism: Russia's war against Ukraine has proven again that the United States is an indispensable nation and has reclaimed its place as leader of the free world.

One thing is clear: the historical importance of Ukraine, and of this war, is beyond reasonable dispute. As Yaroslav Hrytsak recently wrote in the New York Times:

Ukraine is once again at the center of a potentially global conflict. World War I, as the historian Dominic Lieven put it, "turned on the fate of Ukraine." World War II, according to the legendary journalist Edgar Snow, was "first of all a Ukrainian war." Now the threat of a third world war hinges on what could happen in Ukraine…. After all, the struggle for Ukraine, as history tells us, is about much more than just Ukraine or Europe. It is the struggle for the shape of the world to come.

In an effort to make more sense of the confusing and rapidly changing events in Ukraine, I recently spoke with Matthew Schmidt, a professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven. Schmidt is an expert on Russia, defense, intelligence and foreign policy who has taught strategic and operational planning at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College. He has also taught at the Army War College and served as a representative to Ukraine's presidential election after the 2014 Maidan Revolution. His analysis and commentary have been featured on CNN, NBC News, Fox News, CBC News, CBS News and other outlets.

In this conversation, Schmidt explains why Russia's invasion of Ukraine has gone so badly, leaving Putin's military in a stalemate and on the verge of defeat. He also argues that, contrary to the analysis offered by many commentators, Putin himself is a rational actor, whose decisions are meant to advance his goal of a form of Russian manifest destiny that places his nation at the center of human history.

Schmidt issues an ominous warning: He believes Putin may order the use of battlefield nuclear weapons against Ukraine as a way of forcing a surrender and peace on his terms. With Russia's invasion force blunted by fierce Ukrainian resistance, Putin is targeting cities and other population centers for destruction in an effort to force Zelenskyy to sue for peace.

At the end of this conversation, Schmidt describes Zelenskyy as the true leader of the free world and a model of leadership that will be studied decades into the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As an expert in international relations and military affairs, when you look at Russia's war in Ukraine what do you see?

I see a war of independence that started in 2004 and will come to an end here. I do not believe it's just a war of independence in Ukraine. In the end, this all ends in the streets of Moscow. The shooting may stop in a year, it may stop in five years, or it may take considerably longer. But this is the event that has to bring down Putin. I think Ukraine frees Russia, eventually.

In terms of the mainstream American news media, 24/7 news cycle and all these talking heads and pundits, what are they getting wrong about the war?

The overall narrative frame was incorrect. We see this with all the retired generals who are on TV making their rounds. These generals are describing the war in Ukraine in terms of realpolitik. They take Putin's claims about Ukraine being in NATO seriously. Ukraine becoming part of NATO does not change the strategic balance.

The other incorrect assumption was that Russia was going to take Ukraine easily, that it was somehow inevitable. Too many observers misunderstood the nature of the Ukrainian military and how, in a good way, their society was militarized over eight years.

Putin talks as though we're going to roll tanks to Moscow from eastern Ukraine, which is just absurd. What such claims reveal is that Putin doesn't understand modern warfare. Stupidity is always a causal possibility here as well. Or Putin is engaging in maskirovka, this idea that you lie and deceive your enemy. One can even lie to their own people in the pursuit of this greater good.

The other error is a willingness by too many supposed experts to disregard the fact that Putin is driven by a vision, a form of manifest destiny.

What I find frustrating is the business of punditry itself. These people go from being supposed experts on the pandemic a few weeks ago to now being "experts" on military affairs and international relations. Some of the loudest and most confident voices do not have much specific expertise on matters of war and violence and politics.

You can do a lot of harm if you have access to mass media and you're not using that power to properly educate the public. When I am interviewed, I think of myself as a teacher. My class isn't in front of me in person, it's on the other side of that camera. I have 30 seconds to say something that will help people better understand this confusing and frightening situation.

Too many pundits go on TV and do interviews and focus on how they have 30 seconds for the camera to be pointed at them. They are thinking about how to make this time about me, because this is my career now — or my second career in the case of retired generals or others with a similar background. Many commentators actually seem to be excited when they talk about the war in Ukraine. In my opinion, that is dangerous in terms of what it does to U.S. policy.

What are some analyses you have seen that are just pure hyperbole? Are there others that perhaps underplay the real dangers?

I'm not sure there is much hyperbole anymore. At the start of the war, the discussions about the potential for Putin to use nuclear weapons were hyperbolic. We have seen his tone change. We now have to take Putin's threats seriously and consider the most extreme possible outcomes.

I do not believe that Putin is going to nuke London and New York. I think that the real threat is the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. Because to me, what is driving Putin is his vision of manifest destiny for Russia and the larger region. I also believe that this vision is quasi-religious. What happens with secular "religious" fanatics, people possessed by some sense of destiny and vision, is that they often end up as martyrs and are willing to do extreme things. That is what is truly frightening to me.

There's good cause for people to be scared, but again, they are scared of the wrong thing. People are scared that New York is going to be nuked, instead of battlefield weapons being dropped across Ukraine, breaking that taboo.

Why would Russia deploy battlefield nuclear weapons? Why risk that spiral of escalation?

The danger is that Putin is losing the war. The Russians have — this comes from the Soviet era — written into their doctrine a theory called "escalate to de-escalate." Putin could escalate the war by using battlefield nukes to bring Zelenskyy to the table, who would then say that the cost to society, to his people, of doing this is now greater than the desire to hold on to their unity, their sovereignty as a nation. That's one way Putin could do it. He could use battlefield nukes in order either to push the West to act as an arbiter in negotiations with Zelenskyy, or to back the West off.

As long as he's using nukes inside Ukraine, it's a reasonable bet that the West won't intervene. Putin can use those nukes to regain control of what we in military planning call "operational tempo." Here Putin is forcing the other side to react to him instead of vice versa. At present, the Ukrainians and Russians are evenly matched to some degree. The Ukrainians are forcing the Russian military to react. The Russian military was not ready for that. But of course, using tactical nukes would radically change that balance.

Nobody starts a war planning to lose. What were Putin and his generals' assumptions? How did it go so wrong for them?

They thought they could take Ukraine in a few days and that they would have Kyiv and functional control of the rest of the country. They woefully underestimated the fighting spirit and commitment of the Ukrainian military and of ordinary Ukrainians. Putin and his generals also misunderstood that the Ukrainian military always had a two-line strategy. The first was to defend the borders as long as possible. The second was to fall back in a cohesive way so that those military units were still able to operate in an orderly way and then transition into guerrilla war. The civilian reserves are integral to Ukraine's defenses as well.

What was the Russian military's plan, on the tactical level?

I train people at the operational and strategic level of war. The mistakes the Russian military made are at that operational level. As a practical matter, there are errors in how they are trying to bring together a series of tactical operations into a whole that in turn leads to a strategic aim.

It appears that the Belarusian troops and the troops from the north are mostly conscripts. The plan was to roll them in, in large numbers, to take Kyiv. But these forces were second-tier. In the south, the Russians positioned the naval infantry, the marines out of Novorossiysk, to take the road that runs along the Sea of Azov and connects into Crimea. Those forces would then work as ground troops in cities like Mariupol and in the surrounding area. Russian forces are working toward Odessa, which is understood to be a "Russian city" culturally and is very important to Putin to take.

Putin had bad troops in the north who failed to maintain their vehicles. Stupidity was the causal variable that really caused that much-discussed huge convoy to bog down. The key error there was not maintaining the vehicles. The other error was that the Russians do not have a good NCO core, meaning the non-commissioned officers. Russian troops were also not told what they were going to Ukraine to do. That is a tactical error that has strategic-level importance.

And then, of course, where has the Russian air force been? The Russians did not expect the Ukrainians to be as capable as they have been in air defense. That's been a huge problem for the Russians, and will continue to be, because the United States has given Ukraine so many Stinger missiles. The U.S. and NATO are going to try to create a no-fly zone from the ground up. The Russian pilots were not given enough hours in their jets to properly train. They are not capable of effectively maneuvering around the Ukrainian air defenses, which they should be able to do.

Is this a story of the Russian military being incompetent or is the Ukrainian military that good?

It is both. The Ukrainian military is one of the best in Europe now. It's small, and it doesn't have the equipment, but it is battle-hardened. You have two or three generations of fighters who have now passed through the front lines in Ukraine, going back to 2014. There are a lot of Ukrainians that have really good operational experience on the ground.

I think the Russians really did underestimate just how good the Ukrainian military was. Putin misunderstood the nature of the war. I also believe that Putin, like Western armchair generals, overplayed the impact of fancy tech and fancy weapon systems, and underplayed the importance of solid small-unit capabilities and the will to fight.

And then I think you have a problem with the culture of the Russian military. It is true that Putin modernized the military, but the culture is still heavily Soviet. It is deeply hierarchical. It doesn't devolve command down to the tactical level because it doesn't trust tactical commanders. As a result, the Russian military under that system makes many mistakes on the ground, whereas the Ukrainian military has highly talented, mobile, independent units that can punch above their weight because they're led better than the Russians are, even if the Russians have better weapons.

But this is also why the war is going to get even bloodier. The Soviet tendency to work from the top down means that orders are given to just obliterate cities because that is the easiest thing to do.

There are many cheerleaders for NATO who are proclaiming that the Russian military is so incompetent that the U.S. military, along with NATO, would defeat them easily. What is the error of inference and assumption there, if there is one?

The error is that Putin would escalate. Putin sees Ukraine as Russian territory. If the U.S. and NATO were to go into Ukraine and impose a no-fly zone or something of that sort, Putin is going to see that as an attack on Russia. Putin would then have a rationale to escalate with things like battlefield nukes.

There are units such as the naval infantry that are probably Russia's best troops. They would put up a hard fight. But as good as those elite troops are, our entire Marine Corps is as good as they are. Not just our special forces in the Marine Corps, but your average jarhead is probably close to Russia's best in many ways. Yes, we would win if we were allowed to fight it at that level. But Putin would escalate to de-escalate.

Will the weapons and other support being sent to Ukraine by the U.S. and its NATO allies help to turn the tide of battle against the Russian forces? I am thinking specifically of Switchblade drones and other semi-autonomous weapons, as well as the S-300 surface-to-air missile systems that are being discussed.

When Zelenskyy says he needs a no-fly zone, we should listen. But in this case, I see the evidence as showing that the bulk of the damage is being caused by missiles and artillery. We've made a mistake not putting in Patriots or an "Iron Dome" system, and anti-artillery systems (counter-battery systems). Not doing that has given Putin leverage by being able to punish civilians and in effect take them hostage because he can target civilians with impunity.

Is Vladimir Putin a rational actor? That does not mean that you and I or anyone else endorse his behavior — that is a common misunderstanding of the definition. How do experts explain what that concept actually means?

Here is how I explain the concept of a "rational actor." You go home for Thanksgiving, and you have one side of your family that watches Fox, and you have the other side of your family that watches MSNBC. Both sides are rational, but you don't recognize the validity of the logic of the other side. But within their system of logic, they're behaving appropriately. If A leads to B leads to C, and someone on the other side of the table says, "Well, then the next answer is D," that's rational. That's following the system of logic. If they go, "A leads to B, leads to C, leads to F," that doesn't make sense, that is illogical. But Putin's not crazy. Putin is following his own system of logic. He's as predictable as any of us are.

What is Putin's theory of Russia's destiny?

Putin believes that Russia has a special place in world history. Russia's role is to drive world history by standing between what he sees as European values and Asian values. In Putin's mind, if Russia is not the center of this geographic and cultural and spiritual space known as Eurasia, then the future of mankind is different, perhaps even catastrophic. Putin is trying to preserve the capacity of Russia to keep its space as a great power in human history. Putin has to maintain control of Ukraine because it is historically and spiritually critical to that project.

For Putin, if Ukraine goes democratic and adopts European values, which "Eurasianism" is against, then Ukraine becomes the point through which Russia loses its Eurasian values and becomes European. He is afraid of a Westernized and Europeanized Ukraine that has a stable democracy, however corrupt and whatnot, that believes in things like gay rights and a free press. If that happens, that destroys what Putin believes is the appropriate cultural space for Russia to lead.

There is a multitude of competing images and narratives about the events in Ukraine. What advice do you have for the public about how to better navigate what is really happening? How can the public be more critical in terms of understanding propaganda and how these images and stories are generated and in whose interests?

The public needs to understand that the information war is arguably more important than the war on the battlefield. To some extent, the kinetic war is driven by the need to create images and narratives that are circulated across the information realm. In turn, this drives the willingness of the U.S. Congress, for example to pass bills that will bring aid to Ukraine. That is a huge strategic win for Ukraine, in terms of the information war and world public opinion. Propaganda works best when there is truth in it, even if there are things that are not real as well.

I also believe that, insofar as you can have a justified or a moral war, then Ukraine's defense of their country is one such example. The public needs to get ready for the fact that there will be atrocities committed by Ukrainian troops. There is a huge amount of anger in these troops. Especially as this devolves into a war with civilians, I think you'll see those stories come out. You'll find less disciplined civilian defense units that will commit war crimes against Russians if they have the opportunity.

How would Putin define some sort of "victory with honor," in terms of ending this war in a ceasefire or other negotiated resolution?

Victory for Putin is controlling the political future of Ukraine. Putin does not need to make Ukraine a part of Russia in the legal sense. However, Putin has to control the political future of Ukraine. I do not believe there is an ending to this war short of that which will satisfy Putin. That is why I'm afraid of escalation.

Again, ultimately this ends in the streets of Moscow with the destruction of the Putinist regime. For Russia, this means the culmination of its post-Soviet stage of development because it has replicated the same sort of personality cult as the czars and Stalin. Now it is in the form of Putin. That must end.

That's where we end up ultimately. It may be a long time after the shooting stops in the war. I do not see any other route for the Russian people but to decide that their country has to step down from being a world power and instead be a European power, with all the rights and theories of European governance in place. Russia must cede its position as a world player to countries like the U.S. and China.

The situation in Ukraine is dynamic. With all of the talk of negotiation, Putin's army supposedly stalled and daily images of atrocities, how do you read the big picture?

The Russian military has reached "culmination." That term means the time when the attacking force can no longer continue its advance. Russia has been hit unexpectedly hard. It's taken significant losses, including in senior officers, critical equipment and supplies. The front is basically static at this point.

The implication is that Putin will have to: 1) negotiate, 2) resupply and restart the same basic plan or 3) adopt a new plan that gets around the reasons he can't advance. Putin is not actually ready to negotiate. He will escalate the war with NATO and not Ukraine. The escalation is aimed at pressuring the West to be his weapon and to put pressure on Zelenskyy to capitulate, because he knows the West won't intervene to allow Ukraine to win on the ground.

Zelenskyy is now saying that he'd negotiate right away. Putin changed his plan and decided to use missiles and artillery — which the West could have helped to blunt — to take whole cities and populations hostage. Now Zelenskyy is being forced to choose between the population he's responsible for that is being held hostage, such as in Mariupol, and the things that population is fighting and dying for, which are independence, territorial integrity and European values and identity.

Putin's center of gravity is the fact that he can hold those cities hostage. Without that, he doesn't have leverage. But at this moment in the war, Putin has that leverage. In this moment, Putin is in fact not deterrable by anything Ukraine can do, because they don't have the tools to stop his hostage-taking.

The only other choice for Zelenskyy is to continue the fight until the conditions shift and he has leverage to counter Putin's leverage, but at a great cost in the lives of his people. The only other option is for NATO to intervene by forcibly setting up the necessary weapons to stop the missiles and artillery, which would be a significant escalation.

How would you assess Zelenskyy's performance?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has effectively become the leader of the free world. He has articulated the values of the West better than any of his peers and proven himself the most capable military leader on the planet today. He has led his people to a stalemate against the second-best military on the planet. Even if he can't "win," he's shown Western militaries how to use information, diplomacy and force of arms to fight the most modern war yet. He will be studied in war colleges for decades to come.